Castle One (The Light Bulb Film)

Malcolm Le Grice - 3D.

"Like all the works I have done which refer directly to another artist, After Lumière… is not directly 'about' the Lumière original. It is the starting point for an investigation. In this case it is an investigation into consequentiality, or at least the significance of sequentiality in the construction of meaning and concept. As such, the film encroaches on 'narrative' cinema, but in a way which treats narrativization as problematic, not transparent." - Malcolm Le Grice

Arbitrary Logic, an interactive audio-visual synthesiser was first presented under the working title Osnabruk at the Osnabruk festival of 1987 and later as part of an improvised and computer music performance with Keith Rowe at the London Filmmakers Cooperative, December 1989.

Abstract art film made for gallery exhibition.

Found film sequences brought together in the paranoia of the cold war and Vietnam.

Illuminated by two blank screens projected from empty slides, four performers read texts drawn from the history of cinema – a dictionary of cinema, the chemical production of film materials and a fragment of a Hollywood narrative film script. The readings are treated as a musical quartet with a gradual superimposition of the four readings on each other. slide-performance

Self Portrait looks for an approach to a specific relationship between the duration of a work and material conditions in the projection as did William Raban in the film-performance Take Measure. The main difference is that Raban’s work was made when cinematic media had distinct physical properties linking medium directly to image - this self portrait recognizes that there is no such simple materiality for cinema following the emergence of digital processes. Instead the work takes a conceptual base – the speed of light and the time taken for light to travel from the sun to illuminate objects on earth –thus the duration of 8 minutes 20 seconds.

From the earliest point when I started to make film one of the biggest influence on my way of thinking came from Franz Kafka. In particular the titles ‘Castle One’ and ‘Castle Two’ made symbolic reference to Kafka’s book ‘The Castle’. In this book, like ‘The Trial’ the central fictitious but ‘first-person’ existential character was ‘K’ – clearly in part an oblique but intentional reference to Kafka’s own name. The short video sequence used in ‘For the Benefit of Mr. K’, was shot in the little street in Prague showing the small house in which Kafka wrote ‘The Trial’. The title is also a direct reference to the song by the Beatles. The sound track is a short sequence discovered by my son of the Beatles rehearsing this song in the Abbey Road recording studio.

‘Critical Moment One’ was an un-planned recording of a one-year old boy exploring shells and sand on a beach. Though the boy was my own grand-son, it was never seen as a ‘home-movie’ – the child’s face is never seen and it was shot over his shoulder - as close to his ‘point-of-view’ as I could get. As a young man and as my own children grew up, I was greatly intrigued by the book ‘The Construction of Reality in the Child’ by Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget. Piaget made an exceptionally close observation of the changing stages of behavior of his own children which provided me with a conceptual framework for my own observations.

In October 2009 I did a show in Prague. I returned to the Kafka house of my ‘Benefit of Mr K’ but found the whole street and Castle area had become a tourist trap – so I wandered into the back-streets at the bottom of the hill and found a little local bar for a plate of sausage, mustard and strong brown bread. Intending to drink some wine I noticed that Absinthe was included in the drinks list so ordered it. I admitted to the bar-keeper that I had never had it before and he showed me how it should be mixed and flamed with sugar – and I recorded with my pocket video camera. With a little gesture to Picasso and Degas, I became the Absinthe Drinker.