Horror Film 1

This is our current project-in-progress.

You might be wanting to use the manual for Horror Film 1 we have evolved with Malcolm and artists who have been using it, in particular Cinza Nistico from Italy. Find the current version here and record your performance in the log book here.

You might also want to see what the loops look like – here is a digital transfer of the loops we used from 2013 to 2022, they are quite scratched https://vimeo.com/802856629?share=copy&fl=sv&fe=ci. Here are some thumbnails. We believe this section of Love Story 2 was made using printer lights but there are no frame lines between frames so this tells us it was not the LFMC Debrie step printer that produced this. Don’t be fooled by the colours in these grabs, each loops has a full range of colours, yellow, orange, red, blues, greens, purple, very dark blue black.

The loops never sync up and that’s what produces the beautiful effects in HF1. Here’s Lucas checking out the loops in 2022 in the School of Creative Arts gallery at University of Wollongong.

Here’s a Flickr folder with these images.

A 16mm interneg is held at Niagara Film Lab in Toronto, made from these loops. The print produced from these loops has been mixed (the first print was rushed and very over exposed, low density, lacking density in the colour, they’ve been used with filters by Cinzia Nistico and team). The second print was used for Ardit’s performance at Big River, Thailand, Dec 2025, it was okay but contains the scratches in the original, a bit disconcerting for those organising the performance.

Lab Laba Laba’s Ardit Martodiharjo‘s performance took place in Thailand at a fantastic meeting of the artist run labs and film artists of the South East Asian region/Asian region in Dec 2025, called Big River (happened in Kanchanaburi at Rolling Wild’s lab and surrounds).

TLC’s project on transmitting HF1 to the year 3026 using DNA storage in collaboration with data scientist Raja Appuswamy is here LATEST INFO – see this page (Sept 2024), there’s a related and very fun post here about Lucas actually meeting our collaborators Raja and Malcolm in person here

You can also find our video note for the community on Malcolm’s passing.

In mid-2013, Louise and Lucas visited the UK to begin research on a possible re-enactment of Malcolm Le Grice’s Horror Film 1 (1971).

Malcolm invited us to work with him on this, after hearing about our other expanded cinema re-enactment projects.

We spent the best part of a week in Devon, discussing Horror Film 1 (and a million other things) – from a technical point of view, but also in terms of its cultural/technological context, then and now.

In all our re-enactments, we’re interested to explore what the work “meant” when it was originally presented to the public, and what it might mean now.

Meaning, of course, is mediated by technological changes, historical shifts, and biographical events in the life of the artist. Even an extremely faithful re-presentation is different from the ‘original’ in so many ways.

As we go along with our thinking and doing around Horror Film 1, we’re posting occasionally here.

Here is a documentation video of Louise Curham performing our first iteration of our re-enactment of Horror Film 1, in June 2014 at Canberra Contemporary Artspace:

An article we wrote on the process of working with Horror Film 1 has been published in Performance Matters journal. It’s entitled “Reaching Through to the Object: Reenacting Malcolm Le Grice’s Horror Film 1“.