Peter Gidal - Cinema at a Distance

Gidal je pionir strukturalno-materijalističkog eksperimentalnog filma. Važan je i kao teoretičar filma - njegovu knjigu Materialist Film možete čitati ovdje.

Clouds

Frantic frame edge defining nothingness. "The anti-illusionist project engaged by Clouds is that of dialectic materialism. There is virtually nothing on screen, in the sense of in screen. Obsessive repetition as materialist practice not psychoanalytical indulgence." - PG (Nov 1975)

"Gidal's film Clouds establishes an awareness of position, a confrontation, and it takes you back to you from the far reaches of eternal space the confrontation as with you." - Steve Dwoskin

ROOM FILM 1973 Peter Gidal1973  55mins Colour 16mm

The anti-illusionist project and the materialist dialectic are not more mechanistic goals than for example Marxist political theory and practice.

"This film is a consequent continuation and contraction of my film work, research which began with Room (1967). The film is not a translation of anything, it is not a representation of anything, not even of consciousness." -P.G.

"The anti-illusionist project & the materialist dialectic are no more mechanistic goals than for example Marxist poltical theory and practice. This film is a consequent continuation and contraction of my film work, research which began with Room (1967). The film is not a translation of anything, it is not a representation of anything, not even of consciousness." - PG "I liked your Room Film very much. It is very good... I felt as if my father had made it, as if it was made by a blind man. I liked the tentativeness... sometimes the repeating shots would be clear, other times one couldn't tell if it was continuous. One had to work at it. I think it is a really beautiful film. I liked the splices! I feel that searching tentative quality a lot, that quality of trying to see." - Michael Snow (Sept 1973) "I was particularly impressed with Gidal's film, which from what I've seen may be his best to date. Very subtly and very plastically it deals with light. The film is uncompromisingly rigid in its minimality of action. A very beautifully realised piece of work... it is definitely contemporary in feeling and substance. It is one of the best films to come out of the London School." - Jonas Mekas, Village Voice (1973) "...there is no describable content, but one watches with fascination the representation of the objective world through the agency of light and its absence. An important enlargement of the historical conception of modernism, Gidal also poses the problem of the dialectic of representation, through representation (Rembrandt, Giacometti, etc)." - Malcolm Le Grice

PETER GIDAL Anonymity created through transformations in the filmic present, during the moment of perception, the viewer/viewing. Biographical details: Born in 1946. Gidal studied theatre, psychology and literature at Brandeis University, Massachussets, 1964-68, and the University of Munich from 1966-7. He studied at the Royal College of Art from 1968-71 where he went on to teach Advanced Film Studies until 1984. He was an active member of the London Film-makers' Co-operative since 1969, and Cinema Programmer there from 1971-4. Co-founder of the Independent Film-makers' Association, 1975, he served as a member of the British Film Institute Production Board, 1978-81. His films have been screened nationally and internationally, including the Tate Gallery, the Hayward Gallery, and yearly since 1969 at the Edinburgh Film Festival and the National Film Theatre. Gidal has had retrospectives of his films at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1983, Centre George Pompidou, Beaubourg, Paris, 1996, amongst others. International screenings include several each at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Royal Belgium Film Archive and Cinematheque, Documenta, Arte Inglesi Oggi, X-Screen, etc. He is the recipient of the Prix de la Recherche, Toulon 1974. Gidal is renowned as a writer and theorist, in particular for his highly influential publication 'Structural Film Anthology' (BFI 1976), other books include 'Andy Warhol: Films and Paintings' (Studio Vista, 1971, Da Capo NY reprint. 1991) and 'Materialist Film' (Routledge, 1988). Gidal's writings have been published extensively in journals including Studio International, Screen, October and Undercut. He is also known for his research and writings on Samuel Beckett, including 'Understanding Beckett: Monologue and Gesture' (Macmillan, 1986).

ASSUMPTION Peter Gidal1997  1 min Colour 16mm

Assumption is a film which operates on many levels. It features glimpses of life at previous, less luxurious premises of the London Film Makers' Co-op; but it is more than a potted history of an organisation.

It pays tribute to Mary Pat Leece, a founding member of Four Corners Film Workshop and a teacher at Chelsea School of Art and St Martin's School of Art, one of the true innovators of the independent film sector who died earlier this year; but it is more than just an elegiac tribute. With its virtuoso editing, voice-overs and scrolling titles, it works as a densely-plotted celebration of independent film culture at the end of the 1990s.

Assumption (Full film)

GUILT Peter Gidal1988  40mins Colour 16mm

Objects in the world given luminousness, light, are here less apprehendable to knowledge than that which has less light.

"What is there in never not the real. No recognition. Absence of the subjectivity of the body's scale. THe simultaneity of abstract and real is not constant, it wavers, although the attempt is to make it constant." -P.G.

KEY Peter Gidal1968  10mins B/W 16mm

He draws out singularities..he allows the camera only a fenced in area, piecemeal.

He lets the gaze hold on objects and constantly repeats..this permits the possibilities of the discrepancies between one's own seeing and seeing with the camera to become distinct, and this in turn allows for a completely different experience of the surroundings.

Birgit Hein, Film Im Underground, 1971.

Key (extract)

UPSIDE DOWN FEATURE Peter Gidal1967-72  76mins B/W & Colour  Also called: Upside Down Backwards Negative Out-take feature. Mainly. Clarification attempt. Bending time + space, reconceptualization, unbending, disassocativeness of word and image, disconnection, interruption. "Hopefully transformative 'use' of Proust, Duchamp, Beckett, Cage. How it is is what it is." -P.G. 1972. "UDF explored the problem of simultaneous function of two distinct language forms which draws attention to the fallacy of assuming that communication occurs during the process of sympathetic involvement common to the technique of the commercial movie. It does this by keeping before the viewer what is being communicated and how; rarely if ever allowing a "standard" representation or reference to reality." -P.G. Afterimage 4 1973 Upside Down Feature (excerpt)

Peter Gidal was born in 1946 and grew up in Switzerland. After studying psychology and German literature at Brandeis University and the University of Munich, he enrolled at the Royal College of Art in London and began his career as an experimental filmmaker. In the 1960s his films were shown at such 'underground' London venues as the New Arts Lab in Drury Lane and the London Film-Maker's Co-op (which he helped to establish) in Chalk Farm. An admirer of American structuralist filmmakers such as Michael Snow and Hollis Frampton, Gidal's own works are also interrogations into the formalist aspect of film, with an emphasis on grain, duration, tempo and editing structures. This is accompanied by an almost wilful insistence on the filmmaker as the ultimate arbiter of the construction of any work. As he puts it:

The question of making things difficult for the spectator in my films is absolutely crucial and historically so, because that is where the break always comes. In the cinema, more than any other art form, the question of difficulty is always raised. With other things there are conventions: for example, it's okay to spend until two o'clock in the morning checking a difficult footnote in a book; difficult paintings are okay because you can walk past them in seconds. But film has an authoritarian structure built into its mechanism in terms of time, being held there for a period of time, which is why most film goes out of its way to avoid precisely that as an issue, whereas my work goes out of its way to raise it as one.

Gidal's films invite audiences to consider various aspects of the mediation between the real and the reel. In his most famous work, Room Film 1973, for example, the artist's camera restlessly investigates a room in minute detail.
Along with Malcolm LeGrice, Peter Gidal is the foremost exponent of British structural cinema. He taught at the RCA from 1971 to 1983 and he remains active as ever as a filmmaker and theorist, as evidenced by a gorgeously hallucinogenic website (http://www.scs.khm.de/semclips/petergidal.html), wherein he discusses (after a fashion) his work, entitled His Master's Voice. His films were given a retrospective at the Pompidou Centre, Paris in 1996 and at the Lux, London in 1998.
Bibliography
Auty, Chris, 'State of Siege', Time Out, 18-24 Jan. 1980, pp. 14-15
Dusinberre, Deke, 'Consistent Oxymoron: Peter Gidal's Theoretical Strategy', Screen, Summer 1977, pp. 79-88
Gidal, Peter (ed.), Structural Film Anthology (London: BFI, 1974)
Gidal, Peter, 'Flashbacks: Peter Gidal', Filmwaves, no. 7, Spring 1999, pp. 16-20
O'Pray, Mike, The British Avant-Garde Film 1926-1995 (Luton: University of Luton Press/Arts Council of England, 1997)
O'Pray, Mike, 'Action at a Distance', Monthly Film Bulletin, March 1986, p. 64
www.screenonline.org.uk/


Cinema at a Distance (interview with Peter Gidal)

From The Soho News (January 14, 1981). — J.R.

“When I came to New York in September,” English avant-garde filmmaker and film theorist Peter Gidal tells me, “I noticed that almost every film review that I read used food metaphors and digestion metaphors to talk about art and cinema. Because consumption, digestion and predigestion is the dominant mode in this country. It’s just one signifier of the attempt to break with materialism and process, and to anthropomorphize everything.”

An “English” label should be assigned to Gidal only after some qualification. Born in 1946, he grew up in Mount Vernon, N. Y., and Switzerland and attended Brandeis University before settling in London in the late 60s. Although his accent sounds more redolent of Manhattan than of London, he has spent only two of the past 21 years in the U.S.

Regarding his opposition to food metaphors (as well as narrative), he recalls a drinking cup that he used as a kid for drinking milk. “It had a house on the outside, and on the inside, as you gradually drank, you could see the words, ‘The End.’”

“Which ties up with the idea of closure,” I suggest pedantically, referring to a discussion we’ve been having about Action at a Distance, his latest film.

“And American milk,” Peter says. “Which tastes wonderful.”

***

As a rule I find myself spending a lot more time thinking about Gidal’s anti-narrative, anti-illusion theory of film than I do either looking at or thinking about his “structuralist/materialist” films. Like many other locals who might have been interested, I missed a screening of Action at a Distance at Millennium in late October because of the Kitchen’s concurrent TV symposium (although I did get to a show of older Gidal films at the Collective two weeks earlier).

So when Peter — a friend since the mid-70s — came out to my Hoboken flat for this interview, he brought along a print of Action at a Distance for me to see. I’m glad I saw it, but I can’t say it furnishes more to me than diagrams enacting reduced models that are produced by his theory. This theory, however, is something that I find productive and useful — particularly as a dialectical critique of the cinema that I usually make my living writing about.

Action at a Distance features a somewhat abstract text, written by one woman and read by another, over hand-held shots of diverse fragments of domestic spaces, for approximately half an hour. It doesn’t commit any of the crimes that Gidal argues most films commit. It doesn’t even seek to be beautiful — only lucid and correct. (”I’m quite happy to admit that I am not interested in Snow’s work for ‘the beauty,’” he wrote almost a decade ago in a polemical exchange with structural filmmaker Michael Snow about Snow’s Back and Forth, included in Gidal’s Structural Film Anthology.)

“To annihilate beauty is not some kind of metaphysical statement that beauty shouldn’t exist in the world,” Gidal explains to me. “Even to mention that would be an impossible negation, because beauty exists in the same way that representation exists. But it exists in certain codes and manifestations and positions for certain people as their positions. So to say I’m not concerned with beauty — that’s because (A) from a puritanical point of view it’s very easy to create beauty. (B) If you have a traditionally high-art education, and if you come out of a kind of history — out of painting, sculpture, theater, movies and all that — then as far as I’m concerned, it’s the least interesting, least productive aspect of a practice, to create something someone else might say is beautiful.

“The worst part is, it’s meaningless in the bad sense. It’s the seductive element, which is separate from everything else which work is doing. It’s the element which represses, in fact, the operations that exist between you and a film, or a film’s operation on and through you as a viewer, or the imaginary inhabitant of a space in a film or a narrative. Whatever it is, it’s the beauty which seduces and represses at the same time.

“So it’s the politically reactionary element in beauty I was referring to,” Gidal concludes, adding, “A lot of good work is beautiful.”

***

“Would it be correct, then, to call you a minimalist?” I’m thinking now not only of Gidal’s 1971 book, Andy Warhol — the first book on Warhol in any language — but also his projected study of monologue and gesture in the work of Samuel Beckett, the other living artist he respects most, which Macmillan in England plans to publish.

“I’m a purist in the sense that the work has to do with very few elements. Very little is dealt with, I don’t have a  broad range at all. I went through the whole 60s without going to double-screen, triple-screen, stereo — none of that stuff. I have enough problems dealing with single-screen. A very minimal area of concern — if that’s what you mean, yeah, hopefully they’re rigorous and rigid almost, in a very small area.”

“What action are you thinking about in the title of your film?”

“Well, action at a distance has something to do with the film’s being at a distance, as opposed to within — you are not within them. And action is a good word. It poses a real Leninist notion of contradiction. Not just multiple interpretation or ambiguity — which is the dominant art-journal/art-history way of seeing it, certainly in New York — but real contradiction where opposites literally come out of a same point. And these opposites then have to be worked through and processed, and then an ideological, political position is usually taken, to go on from there.
“It’s not like a unity of opposites, but both are there and then it’s politics that motor one position over the other, as opposed to that silly notion of the happy synthesis. `Action’ therefore has a lot of meanings, from `action in the street’ (slang) — of which there isn’t any in the film — and action in the sense of act, narrative, something happening….
“In general it’s a context for a kind of film which is meant to deal with questions of internal action, action of the viewer, the subject of the viewer and how he or she is placed or not able to be placed, ot only illusionistically placed within the film, the sound-image relation….
“I hate to say this, but Gertrude Stein and Ludwig Wittgenstein are both important — yet the latter can hardly be mentioned because in New York everyone mentions him, none of whom seems to have read him. But there’s a Steinian and Wittgensteinian and Beckettian importance to that kind of work on language and signification and that inability of the hold on the real by language. One practice doesn’t cover another. A film is not about the world.”

***

Maybe not. If that’s the case, then Gidal has to his credit two dozen films since 1966 about themselves, all on deposit at the London Filmmakers’ Co-op. (Four are in te New York Co-op.) A partial history of this co-op is given by Gidal, one of its founders, in his essay in The Cinematic Apparatus, a collection recently published over here by St. Martin’s Press. The most useful of these films that I’ve seen is Room Film 1973 – made the same year he started to teach graduate students at the Royal College of Art — which intermittently allows the viewer a certain hypnotic engagement, which is then interrupted.

At one point Peter reads me an entry from Brecht’s notebooks in 1920: “One has one’s own laundry and one washes it. One doesn’t have one’s own words, and one doesn’t wash them. In the beginning was not the word — the word is at the end.” For a theorist as difficult as Gidal, it’s nice that he can often refer to material things, in interviews as well as films — at least using laundry metaphors if not ones connected to the idea of consumption.

“Everything is the effect of a productive labor process,” he says, “even every cultural moment. And if the film and the process of the film are produced in a materialist as opposed to an idealist manner  — both in the way it situates the viewer and in its own textual operation, in the crude material sense the way it’s structured — then you can produce everything as effect, even emptying-out, the fact that nothing adheres.”

- Jonathan Rosenbaum

   
Theory and Definition of Structural Film   Peter Gidal film notes - Chris Kennedy    

Peter Gidal attempts to recall how he started making films and why, what his intentions were and how his politics and aesthetics developed

Started making films in Munich in 1966, in my head, because I had wanted to be a theatre director and couldn't figure out a reason to move actors anywhere on stage, having worked in Salzburg in 1966 on the Wysten Auden/ Chester Kallman/ Hans Werner Henze opera The Bassarids, and as general assistant on Lindtberg's production of Midsummer Nights Dream, then in Munich at the Kammerspiele in the graduate-seminar of August Everding. Having loved theatre to no avail, still finding no cause to move anyone from point a to point b, I gave up before beginning. And had been so taken - in 1964 - with Warhol's Blowjob, in 1963 with Godard's Le Mepris (in Zürich, shortly before going to university) that filmmaking "naturally" emerged from the love of theatre. In '66 had also been reading about Chelsea Girls, finally saw it in '67 in Boston, was overwhelmed, had been by then to so many films that impressed me, Bande a Part and La Chinoise (Godard), Muriel (Resnais), not to mention the attachment since 1963 to Beckett's Endgame and Krapp's Last Tape no less than Lorca's Yerma and Genet's The Maids; Ibsen, Schiller, no less than Le Roi Jones' The Slave and The Toilet, as well as Ionesco and Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy, though theatre influences had all along had "cinematic" possibilities that made the change fairly automatic when the impulse was there. I made my first films in 1967-8 at Brandeis, as well as (simply to learn how to use the wonderful French shoulder-held Eclair with Angenieux 10:1 lense - though thereafter all my films were made with an Arri-S) a one hour documentary (with two fellow students to earn $200) of the heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, a one year old baby's first Christmas. We stayed in Massachusetts at their house for a week and with a Nagra, an Arri and the Eclair, made this documentary which I foolishly called A Child's Christmas in Dover (Massachusetts). Supposedly thereby learning how to put a conventional documentary together, we'd hide in the baby's bedroom, suddenly switch on enormous amounts of light and film baby Johnson's equally sudden "waking up Christmas morning" (filmed two days ahead of time of course). Also filmed Mom pretending to get her mink coat, Dad playing father christmas... etc. The family were worth I think 3 billion dollars, so it was understandable when on Christmas eve (the real one, not two days early) - we finally had a day off (and they had their privacy) - Mr. Johnson with a magnanimous "Merry Christmas" gave me $15 "so the three of you can go out to have a Christmas dinner." We managed hamburgers and coffee at the local diner, and some unpleasant comments about billionaires. The following June (1968) Warhol was shot. A few days later, I moved to England, and sat in a rented flat (ten guineas) in St. Johns Wood (Abercorn Place) reading IT (International Times), wherein was listed a meeting of the London Film Co-op at the Arts Lab....Went, met Dwoskin, Hartog, LeGrice, Drummond, others, and a week or two later took Room Film (Double take) to the open screening at David Curtis's Arts Lab Film nights or whatever they were called. Actually as there were two copies on one reel and I had no equipment, I asked David what to do to get them separated, he said "why not leave them together", which I thought a wonderful idea... Full article published in Filmwaves - Issue 7, Spring 1999.

  Peter Gidal reflects on Andy Warhol and ponders the question: what do his films mean?
Anyone thinking about the meaning of Warhol's films, or the rest of his work, must first consider the idea of time. Is it, as Beckett and Proust wrote, that "Death is dead because time is dead"? Because, of course, if time persists, then death is not dead - and Warhol has an extraordinary focus on death.

This is especially so in the film Henry Geldzahler. As with many of Warhol's works of 1963-66, this film is anything but camp, anything but coy, anything but anti-intellectual. That's presumably why, when it was shown 10 years ago at the NFT, there were just 11 people present. Is it Henry's persistent death-like skeletal endurance, the stare which reduces the flesh to a reduction of means as well as a reduction to (un)certain ends? Warhol's work isn't metaphor or conceit. Its presence is the presence - however impossible that concept - of two timeframes inextricably working together. I remember Andy in 1967 at the Factory in the midst of screening Imitation of Christ, the five of us present silent for 40 minutes as the reel unplayed itself. Somehow all were transfixed in spite of (because of?) the passage of time. Years later he said to me, "Peter, what are all those rings you're wearing?" "They're rings, Andy, different rings." "What do they mean?" "Oh come on, what d'ya mean what do they mean?" With Warhol, the search for meaning was never the humanist or anecdotal or conventional search for meaning; it was anything but. It was always a real intellectual interrogation which was his motive force, his dynamism, his "we're always working". He got both his ends and means right, unlike so many artists before and after him. His films have to be seen to be believed. - www.guardian.co.uk/

Documents containing or tagged with the term Peter Gidal:• About
Reading the light / Artist films from former students of the RCA

• Events
Visionary film: circa '67
Experimenta 2003 / Festival of experimental film, India
Light Reading / Early and recent work by Peter Gidal
Home Movies / Domestic space in artists' film & video
Reverberations #3 / Peter Gidal
Peter Gidal / Reverberations study morning
Reverberations #4 / Nicky Hamlyn (with Conor Kelly)
FILM without FILM / No Soul for Sale: Tate Modern
Measures Series 4: Ian White / 6 or more kinds of Theatre

• Projects
Instructions For Films / Zoo Art Fair
One minute films project
Measures
FILM without FILM / No Soul for Sale: Tate Modern

• Workshops
Peter Gidal / Reverberations study morning
Nicky Hamlyn workshop / Room films

• Publications
Instructions For Films / Postcard box set
Sequence / Issue 1