This is our current project-in-progress.
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“.
Specifications for LC performance of Horror Film 1:
height from floor to top of projector stand – 137cm.
distance from projector stand to projector stand – about 45-50cm to centre top of the stands
This is the breath soundtrack Louise recorded to accompany her first performance of Horror Film 1:
https://soundcloud.com/lcurham/horror-film-1-tlc-re-enactment-louise-breath-track.
We thought it might be a good idea to re-record it with the microphone further away from her mouth, and then amplify it a bit – that way the audio might have a bit more dynamic range. But regardless of that, this first breath soundtrack worked very well – very loud, scary even! And tending towards sounding like something else from time to time (waves crashing on the beach, storm, etc) – good crackles and pops as the microphone struggles to keep up with the air blowing over it.
This is the file of research material I gathered at the British Artists Film and Video Study Collection https://www.flickr.com/photos/lcurham/sets/72157633796535692/
And here’s the related list that goes with those images https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wokpCSH1CgOWIIpg75IfcRP3QYFI8BRsy14WMgGbFQg/edit