Last Week In Brunswick
On memory, "structural film," and Malcolm Le Grice.
The only art which deserves the term realist is that which confronts the audience with the material conditions of the work.
—Malcolm Le Grice, “Material, Materiality, Materialism,” 1978
It’s a warm summer evening in Melbourne, or Narrm, as many residents prefer to call it, especially those whose spiritual or physical home is the inner north, a few dozen of whom have packed themselves into the narrow front room at the Brunswick Green, dressed more dourly than might seem justified given the weather. The feeling of claustrophobia is boosted by the range of objects attached to the reddish-brown walls: old number-plates, a mounted deer head, some unpretentious seascapes. Probably few visitors have ever given a thought to all this clutter, the kind of kitsch you’d expect to find in any pub on Sydney Road. More noteworthy is the object at the back of the room, which might have been picked up at the same junk sale, except it remains in active use: a whirring 16-milimetre projector.
The projector belongs to Brunswick’s Artist Film Workshop collective, founded in 2011 to champion the use of film in the traditional, photochemical sense. Even as the cost per reel of 16mm has shot up along with inner-city rents, the group is flourishing, for reasons not wholly to do with straightforward nostalgia: membership spans several generations, and the monthly screenings are often even more packed than this one, especially when the work screened is by the members themselves.
This evening, however, focuses on the past: a tribute to the late Malcolm Le Grice, a major figure in British avant-garde cinema whose death last December at the age of 84 went largely unnoticed in Australia. There’s a certain irony in AFW being the ones to pick up the slack, considering Le Grice’s career was hardly defined by loyalty to any specific medium: having started out as a painter, he jumped ship from film to video in the mid-1980s, and later had few qualms about having his earlier work digitised, unlike some of his peers. Consciously at least, the mythology of film is exactly what he wasn’t about.
A further irony is that seeing Le Grice’s films on 16mm isn’t necessarily the same thing as seeing them in the form originally intended by their maker. Of the five film included in the hour-long AFW program, all but one exist in alternate versions designed for two or more screens—but for practical reasons, tonight we’re sticking with the single-screen versions exclusively. You could say we’re getting less than the full Le Grice experience, though you could equally say this experience is no longer available to anyone at all: while plans are in place to ensure that his “expanded cinema” works continue to be performed, I’ll take the word of those lucky enough to have seen him in action that it won’t be quite the same.
Something worth mourning, even beyond the loss of the man himself. But then, who said that Le Grice’s work was supposed to live forever? More than most filmmakers, he appears to have understood each screening of his work as a separate, unrepeatable event; moreover, the films themselves convey a powerful sense of the inevitability of loss. Paradoxically, this has helped to keep his work alive beyond its original context of so-called “structural” filmmaking—not to be confused with the wider range of intellectual tendencies known as “structuralism,” though various ill-advised efforts have been made to connect the dots.
What this cinematic structuralism boils down to is an aesthetic so severe it makes the word “aesthetic” sound like a concession to bourgeois decadence, rejecting not only narrative but subject-matter of any kind beyond the material circumstances of the work’s creation. Only thus could audiences be freed from the fascist manipulation characteristic of all other cinema, or so Peter Gidal, the movement’s hardline though not absolutely humourless British theorist, asked his followers to believe.
Le Grice’s own “structural” manifestos reveal him as a more flexible thinker, always keen to let practice dictate theory rather than vice versa. Still, he and Gidal were friends and allies, and in the 1960s and ‘70s he too sought in principle to demystify film, as a technology used to hypnotise and manipulate the public. This project is clearly one which history has left behind, at least in its original form, focused on “film” in the sense of the physical entity (as for demystifying the digital, I’m not sure anybody knows where to begin). Certainly, screening a Le Grice film in any format in 2025 has nothing to do with dispelling the mystique of the medium—any more than screening Battleship Potemkin has anything to do with striking a blow for workers’ rights.
In truth, dispelling mystique was never really what Le Grice’s films were up to. At least, that’s what they seemed to be whispering to us in Brunswick, even as we asked ourselves how far the prints had faded and what we might have gained from seeing them on several screens rather than just one. Yes, these are works that deal with their own creation and reception, as all artworks do in some fashion—but not in the detached manner envisaged by Gidal, “a non-hierarchical, cool, separate unfolding of a perceptual activity”. In hindsight, this whole conception looks as self-deluding as any other critical dogma: the giveaway is Gidal’s yearning to “minimise the content in its overpowering, imagistically seductive sense,” as if it were possible to have truly neutral content, stripped of all power to seduce.
Even if such a thing existed, cinema would still be in the position of animating this content, letting it take on meaning that evolved before our eyes. This need not be a matter of self-conscious symbolism: there’s no call for viewers of Le Grice’s 1970 Berlin Horse to connect the horse in question, photographed in negative, with the pale horse of Death, though equally there’s nothing to stop us doing so if we wish. It’s enough to watch it trotting in a circle in front of a brick wall as if chasing its own tail, while Le Grice shifts the camera’s position in relation to the rephotographed footage, makes it grainer, switches filters, and superimposes one version of the footage on another so a black horse joins the white one, leaving us to ask ourselves if what we’re seeing is best described as one horse or two.
Again, all this is as symbolic as we want it to be; equally, there are moments where the representational image all but dissolves in abstraction. But the horse itself is still there if we look for it, always present, always moving. Movement for its own sake, movement representing the idea of movement: the movement is ours too, chasing the horse in our minds, never fully catching up. Most of the film consists of variations on a single 8mm sequence Le Grice shot on his travels in Germany, but eventually this is joined by a second sequence extracted from an Edison newsreel (so he said, though he also said he found the material in a bin in London’s Soho: you decide). This gives us not just another location but another horse, or perhaps two or more, which a farmhand is leading from a barn that appears to be on fire, as best we can make out amid the smoke.
In a program note for his 1967 Little Dog For Roger, Le Grice spoke of “the deterioration of records like memories”. In Berlin Horse two separately deteriorated records are fused into a new creation, a trick often played by our minds when we try to retrieve the far-off past. Or even the past of three seconds ago, as we may discover when we attempt the test of perception and recollection that is Le Grice’s 1968 Blind White Duration, in which black-and-white cityscapes are snatched away before we’re able to process them in full. Neither “nostalgia” nor any other word in the English language does justice to this emotionally loaded sensation of grappling with memory and its limits, which Berlin Horse induces on yet another level through the deceptive simplicity of Brian Eno’s looped soundtrack: almost but not quite a tune we can hum.
Bringing my own separate memories to bear on all this, a parallel film that comes to mind is Ivor Cantrill’s rotoscoped Myself When Fourteen, completed in 1989 with the assistance of his parents Arthur and Corinne Cantrill—the starting point being a few brief images of the filmmaker in 1970s Oklahoma, running in circles like Le Grice’s horse. To my knowledge, Myself When Fourteen has rarely been cited as a structural film, even though it ticks many of the boxes (as other, earlier Cantrill films do as well). The easy way to explain this is to note that the Cantrills are Australian and leave it at that, but other factors may also be relevant. One is Ivor Cantrill’s autism, which offers us a different way of understanding his “obsessive” repetitions; another is that for all the film’s concentration on formal patterning, no attempt is made to downplay the autobiographical significance of the content.
By comparison, Le Grice tended to shy away from discussing the personal or autobiographical aspects of his work, at least till near the end of his career. Still, he did once remark in a published article that his earliest experiences were of the Second World War—and whether he acknowledged it or not, these experiences plainly left their mark on films such as Whitchurch Down (Duration), made in 1972 using footage shot not far from his birthplace in Devon, which by the time of his third birthday was swarming with American GIs. While a purely formal analysis of this film might be possible, it would struggle to account for a range of unsettling if not outright menacing features: the far-off figures on the horizon viewed as if by a surveillance camera, the soundtrack combining radio static with the roar of a low-flying plane, the ending with its high-pitched electronic noises and flashes of saturated red.
More openly personal still is the extraordinary Little Dog For Roger, accurately apprehended by Stephen Dwoskin as a “film romance”. This again has something to do with childhood memories stretching back to the war, as we’re advised by the opening blast of the morale-boosting 1943 hit “Pedro the Fisherman” (again, the soundtrack draws inspiration from the once utterly mundane act of turning a radio dial; by analogy, this might be said of the image track too). But although it’s illuminating to be told that what we’re seeing is a home movie of Le Grice’s own family, it’s not necessary to know this to feel the emotion. As in Berlin Horse, it’s enough to follow the animal mascot of the title, which in this case travels through several separate scenes on a rephotographed film strip that itself drifts back and forth: accompanying a small boy, swung in circles on a leash by a young woman, and scampering along on its own.
Both in Berlin Horse and here, ambivalence is programmed into the form: constant repetition of the same material, in constantly varied permutations. Some kind of reassurance is offered by this incessant return to the familiar—and yet the dog refuses to keep still, as does the film itself, as if both yearned for a clean break from the past. Unless the break has already occurred, in which case Le Grice is working with the traces of a dead world, not even ghosts. But why should he have clung to these traces, and why should we keep clinging to them now, if not for the hope they might still have something to communicate?
I thought it was about film as a medium and material—scratches, sprocket holes, dirt, slippage in the projector, blank screen, gaps in the sound-track—I forgot that one of the boys was me, the other was my brother, the young woman was my mother—now dead —and behind the camera in 1952 was my father—the dog was mine—nothing to do with Roger—that’s another story.
—Malcolm Le Grice, 2006 program note for Little Dog For Roger, reprinted on his website