Normal Vision. Malcolm Le Grice - ACE132.2

Extracts from Castle One (aka Lightbulb Film;1966): montage of newsreel and other films. Malcolm Le Grice (part VO) says "I want to see a cinema that is in clear opposition to the dominant film and TV culture", points out that the roots of such film-making go back to the origins of modern art, and says that he’s "always tried to give the spectator a positive and productive role". Phillip Drummond talks about the history of the independent, avant garde, cinema, originating in the early Soviet era of the 1920s, coming to prominence in the United States in the 1940s, and now an international phenomenon with its own production, distribution and exhibition outlets. He describes Malcolm Le Grice’s career as a film-maker, teacher and author. Le Grice describes his starting out as a painter, being interested in "transformation and process" and realising that this combination of "movement" and static art form was not unsatisfactory. Talks briefly about his interest in music, and says that he used musical concepts in early films, and made his own soundtracks. Extract from Reign of the Vampire (aka How to Screw the C I A; 1970) in which the soundtrack "largely determined the structure of the film". The sound was controlled using two tape recorders and a mixer, producing a repeating but slowly changing rhythm of sounds, and the images were similarly based on repeating loops. Le Grice VO talking about the threatening (military) nature of many of the images in his early films. Le Grice says he decided that the films were more an expression of paranoia than genuinely political, and he concluded that there was more political value in their artistic structure than in the images, a concept now generally accepted. He adds that cost was another important factor.