Heads
Includes 'portraits' of Marianne Faithfull, Thelonious Monk and 28 others, some known, some less so.
Peter Gidal
Casts & Crew
Also Directed by Peter Gidal
“Theatre theory for film, or not: Brecht (an interrogation/performance: a ghost trio for two).” (Gidal). Taking the form of a multi-part dialogue in which Gidal’s translations of Brecht are spoken, Gidal stages an interrogation of his own practice as an experimental filmmaker and theorist via Brecht’s theatre theory. Without rehearsal (but with practice), Gidal “replied” and counter-interrogated on the night. Performance of Sorts with Brecht, Peter Gidal with Karen Mirza was presented by no.w.here as part of the series Reverberations in collaboration with Chisenhale Gallery on 8th June 2009.
"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."
Peter Gidal's 'Upside Down Feature' is one of the most important films to have been made in this country. It makes a complex and original foray into the nature of film, and, by extension, confronts its audience with a thorough reappraisal of its ways of dealing with film. I found the film exhilarating, but it's unfortunately necessary to add a rider that if you're unused to this type of film, expecting anything remotely similar to what the Big Boys from Wardour St dish you up. then you're in for a major piece of culture-shock which could mean anger, frustration and resentment.
The glass window being installed - labour - being the subject ostensibly of the film...glaziers and glass having a history within representation from the german novella through Beckett's molloy through Duchamp though at the time none of that was conscious, it was for me about the endless superimpositions of a transparent signifier...five layers of optical superimposition (and as each in the lab darkens the scene, it necessitated lightening....each time one step more for each of five 'same' temporalities....) that alone for a viewer/viewing enough to unsettle any seeing through glass, any transparencies....shown at Knokke EXPRMNTL in 1974 to general incomprehension my own included.
In effect, it turns the spectator loose in a problematic textual system which includes both narrative and non-narrative clues; the puzzle cannot be resolved because its terms are systematically ambiguous. The actual filmic material related closely to that used by Gidal in previous films: hand-held shooting in domestic interiors, with tight framing, frequent zooms and re-focusing, aspires to a kind of 'pre-predicative' flux, in which full representation is held in abeyance. However, this material is now fragmented by the regular interruption of black leader, so that it appears as a series of discrete segments which are not, in any syntactic sense, shots - single takes clearly extend across more than one segment.
Gidal describes the film’s ‘so-called imagery’ as ‘a complex of barely visible cuts in space and time, the opposite of erasure, but nothing so much as visible’
The practice of Structural/Materialist Film is defined in...process, construction, displaced reflexively...not displaced uniformly into the pattern of a narrative bound up for the stable subject-centred image. Structural/Materialist film has no place for the look, ceaselessly displaced, outphased, a problem of seeing, it is anti-voyeuristic.
Close Up is a provocative and potentially dangerous pulling together of two opposing aspects of film form - namely, a 'documentartist' soundtrack comprising interview material with Nicaraguan revolutionaries on the subject of art, propaganda and imperialism, and an image track of much beauty, veering toward the abstract as the camera moves ceaselessly over the objects in the a room, or those represented in the 17 blown up photographs. - Michael O'Pray
Loop ended up being a film that also 'ended' Upside Down Feature (1967-72) and was a negative upside down portrait as well....in negative, the person moving, or blinking, or smiling, or not smiling, become gestures distanced whilst simultaneously apprehendable perceptually...a kind of conscious objectification of the subject and subjectification of the object, the abstract as the real, and at the same time a dissolution through repetition, no more an identifyable 'it' after all due to both the reification and no less dissolution through repetition...
Directed by Peter Gidal (1967)