2016 marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of the London Film-makers’ Co-op (LFMC), a ground-breaking organisation that inaugurated a tradition for the production, distribution, and exhibition of artists’ moving image in the United Kingdom that remains vibrant today. To mark this anniversary Tate Britain and LUX will present a monthly series of screenings and artists’ conversations revisiting the legacy of the London Film-makers’ Co-op and its significance today.
Since the 1960s Malcolm Le Grice (UK, 1940) has been one of Britain’s most radical and innovative filmmakers and theorists, questioning and experimenting with the material, structural and experiential processes of cinema.
He originally trained as a painter at the Slade but turned to filmmaking in the mid-1960s. He was an active member of the Drury Lane Arts Lab. Together with David Curtis in 1968, set up the production facilities at the Film-makers’ Co-op, with which he was actively involved throughout the seventies. An early adopter of video and computer technology, Le Grice has also consistently used live performance to explore the experience of moving images within the art gallery.
Technology is also a key concern in the work of Matthew Noel-Tod (UK, 1978), whose films often reframe narrative cinema in relation to experimental moving image, conceptual art, philosophy and literature. Noel-Tod, who took part in the first LUX Associate Artists Programme, paid tribute to Le Grice’s seminal expanded cinema work Castle 1 with his video Castle 3.0. Both artists have recently turned to digital 3D filmmaking as a way to further extend cinema - breaking, extending and complicating conventional screen time.
A selection of works by Le Grice and Noel-Tod will be screened, followed by a conversation between the artists.