LUX

LUX

An international arts agency that supports and promotes artists’ moving image practices and the ideas that surround them. Founded in 2002 as a charity and not-for-profit limited company, the organisation builds on a long lineage of predecessors (The London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, London Video Arts and The Lux Centre) which stretch back to the 1960s. The only organisation of its kind in the UK, LUX represents the country’s only significant collection of artists’ film and video, and is the largest distributor of such work in Europe. LUX works with a large number of major institutions including museums, galleries, festivals and educational establishments, as well as directly with the public and artists. The organisation’s main activities are distribution, exhibition, publishing, education, research, and professional development support for artists and arts professionals. LUX has also established LUX Scotland, which carries out its work in Scotland.

Benjamin Cook is the founder director of LUX. He has been professionally involved in independent film sector in the UK for the past 20 years as a curator, archivist, producer, writer and lecturer.

Film screening: Shoot Shoot Shoot: The First Decade of the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative 1966-76

Founded in October 1966 as a non-commercial distributor of experimental films, the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative was soon reconfigured into a unique organisation that provided access to production facilities and developed a context for radical investigations of film as material. Its film workshop enabled artists to control every stage of the filmmaking process; a creative freedom that was often extended, through the creation of expanded cinema works, to the moment of projection.

Collectively run on a largely voluntary basis, the LFMC operated without funding throughout its early years. Nonetheless, it maintained a distribution office, cinema space and film workshop in each of the run-down, former industrial buildings in which it was based. This precarious but supportive environment was one of the centres of radical culture in 1960s London which stimulated a remarkable body of films and theoretical work that anticipated today’s diverse culture of artists’ moving image.

LUX is the inheritor of the LFMC’s history and last year celebrated its 50th anniversary. This programme presents key works from the first decade of the organisation which have recently been restored digitally.

Including films by Lis Rhodes, Simon Hartog, Peter Gidal, John Smith, Mike Leggett, Marilyn Halford plus Malcolm Le Grice and Anthony McCall expanded film works.

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July 21st – Friday
21:45 Film screening – expanded cinema: Shoot, shoot, shoot 2
(with an introduction by Benjamin Cook)
Brehmer’s Sanatorium – „Black Hall”

July 22nd – Saturday
20:20 Film screening: Shoot, shoot, shoot 1
(with an introduction by Benjamin Cook)
Zdrowie Cinema

Dresden Dynamo
Lis Rhodes UK, 1971 – 1972 5 minutes, Colour, 16mm to HD

It was perhaps the question of sound – the uncertainty of any synchronicity between what was seen and what was said that began an investigation into the relationship of sound to image. Dresden Dynamo is a film that I made without a camera – in which the image is the sound track – the sound track the image. A film document. –L.R

Key
Peter Gidal UK, 1968, 10 minutes, 16mm to HD

an enclosed and progressive disembowelment of durational progression. Birgit Hein, Film Im Underground, 1971.

Footsteps
Marilyn Halford
UK 1975, 6 min, 16mm to HD

Footsteps is in the manner of a game re-enacted: the game in making was between the camera and actor, the actor and cameraman, and one hundred feet of film. The film became expanded into positive and negative to change balances within it: black for perspective, then black to shadow the screen and make paradoxes with the idea of acting, and the act of seeing the screen. The music sets a mood then turns a space, remembers the positive then silences the flatness of the negative. – Marilyn Halford

Shepherd’s Bush
Mike Leggett UK 1971, 15 min, 16mm to HD

Shepherd’s Bush was a revelation. It was both true film notion and demonstrated an ingenious association with the film process. It is the procedure and conclusion of a piece of film logic using a brilliantly simple device: the manipulation of the light source in the Film Co-op printer such that a series of transformations are effected on a loop of film material. From the start, Mike Leggett adopts a relational perspective according to which it is neither the elements nor the emergent whole but the relations between the elements (transformations) that become primary through the use of logical procedure. – Roger Hammond

Associations
John Smith UK 1975, 7 min, 16mm to HD

Images from magazines and colour supplements accompany a spoken text taken from Word Associations and Linguistic Theory by the American psycholinguist Herbert H. Clark. By using the ambiguities inherent in the English language, Associations sets language against itself. Image and word work together/against each other to destroy/create meaning. – John Smith

Soul in a White Room
Simon Hartog, UK, 1968, 4 min, 16mm to HD

”Soul in a White Room was filmed by Simon Hartog around autumn 1968. Music on the soundtrack is Cousin Jane by the Troggs. The man is Omar Diop-Blondin, the woman I don’t recall her name. Omar was a student active in 1968 during ‘les evenement de Mai et de Juin’ at the Faculte de Nanterre, Universite de Paris. Around this time, Godard was in London shooting Sympathy for The Devil / One Plus One with the Stones and Omar was here for that too, appearing with Frankie Y (Frankie Dymon) and the other black panthers in London…. Maybe Michael X too. After returning to Senegal, Omar was imprisoned and killed in custody in ’71 or ’72. I believe his fate is well known to the Senegalese people.” – Jonathan Langran

Castle One
Malcolm Le Grice UK, 1966, 20 minutes, 16mm and Lightbulb

The light bulb was a Brechtian device to make the spectator aware of himself. I dont like to think of an audience in the mass, but of the individual observer and his behaviour. What he goes through while he watches is what the film is about. Im interested in the way the individual constructs variety from his perceptual intake. – Malcolm Le Grice, Films and Filming, February 1971

PROGRAMME 2

Line Describing a Cone
Anthony McCall UK 1973, 16mm, b/w, silent, 30 min

Line Describing a Cone is what I term a solid light film. It is dealing with the projected light-beam itself, rather than treating the light-beam as a mere carrier of coded information, which is decoded when it strikes a flat surface (the screen). The film exists only in the present: the moment of projection. It refers to nothing beyond this real time. The form of attention required on the part of the viewer is unprecedented. No longer is one viewing position as good as any other. For this film every viewing position presents a different aspect. The view therefore has a participatory role in apprehending the event: he or she can – indeed needs to move around, relative to the emerging light-form. – Anthony McCall