In 1970 Malcolm Le Grice made the seven-minute film Berlin Horse. There is no narrative: original 8mm footage of a horse led around a yard in circles is looped and transformed by adding pure spectrum colour filters through the film step-printer in the London Film-makers’ Co-op (LFMC) workshop. It is accompanied by a soundtrack that Brian Eno had made from guitar chords, with a delay pattern that parallels the visual loops, echoing the use of loops by the US minimalist composers Philip Glass and Steve Reich.
Shown at LFMC screenings and film festivals, it went on to make a mark in popular culture through inspiring the look of, and being occasionally glimpsed in, the music video for Catch the Sun by the indie band Doves. Both can be found on YouTube.
In Horror Film 1 (1971) shadows and shapes arise from the film-maker performing live in front of three projectors with fast changing colour loops. It throws the physicality of the projection process itself into focus.
The four-screen projection After Manet, After Giorgione – Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe or Fête Champêtre (1975) has to be “performed” anew each time it is shown. The four quarters of the screen restage a country picnic, while its cumbersome title invokes painting and its particular history of spatial representation. Filmed by Gill Eatherley, Annabel Nicolson, William Raban and Le Grice simultaneously, it explores cinema’s palette: positive and negative, black-and-white and colour, sound and silent, and the grammar of editing as the four juxtaposed screens offer a relational perspective of an al fresco meal.
Le Grice’s trilogy of feature-length films – Blackbird Descending (1977), Emily (1978) and Finnegans Chin (1981) – explore perceptual structures in longer format. As part of Channel 4 television’s commitment to innovation in the form and content of programmes, it showed Finnegans Chin in 1983, together with Normal Vision, an Arts Council profile of Le Grice.
The network then commissioned Sketches for a Sensual Philosophy (1988), which engaged more closely with television forms, shifting visual play from cinema production to new digital configurations. FINITI (2011) uses six horizontal screens to fill an expansive space with shifting soundtracks and visual imagery, moving between shots of the domestic and media depictions of the personal, poetic and political. Dark Trees (2019) was made by launching a camera drone, moving among the intricate superimposed silhouettes of trees at dusk – an orange and brown painting with light made in his garden at Thurlestone in South Devon.
In the view of the British Film Institute, this body of work made him “probably the most influential modernist film-maker in British cinema”.
Born in Plymouth, Devon, to Pamela Rendall, a dressmaker, and Douglas Le Grice, a scrap metal merchant, Malcolm went from secondary schooling at Plymouth college to Plymouth Art College, and then to the Slade School of Fine Art in London as a painter (1961-65), while playing jazz guitar in a local band.
He began to make films, showing his Castle One (1966, one of his works held by Tate Modern) together with paintings at the Drury Lane Arts Lab, central London, in 1968. He also began exploring computer-generated work, participating in Event One, organised by the Computer Art Society, held at the Royal College of Art in 1969.
To help film artists and a wide range of independent film-makers create their work and retain control of it in a commercial industry, he established a film printer and developing tank at the Arts Lab, and, in 1969, a fully equipped film workshop at the Robert Street Arts Lab. He was involved in turning the LFMC into an artist-led, semi-democratic organisation that uniquely combined production, distribution and exhibition, making it an adaptable space to deliver the progressive and the experimental. As well as Eatherley, Nicolson and Raban, the film-makers active there included Peter Gidal, Lis Rhodes and Mike Leggett.
Their experiments coalesced into Filmaktion, a movement that in 1973 had exhibitions at Gallery House, London, and at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. In 2012 there was a reprise of Filmaktion at Tate Tanks, at Tate Modern.
Filmaktion’s approach involved a rejection of conventional narrative, focusing rather on the material properties and effects of film itself. “Expanded cinema”, including live performance and multi-screen projection, took film increasingly into gallery settings, enhancing the range of visual culture in Britain.
In 1965, while still on his postgraduate year at the Slade, Le Grice began teaching part-time on Peter Kardia’s fine art course, then Freddy Gore’s painting department at St Martin’s School of Art, and from the following year at Goldsmiths’ College.
He jointly established the St Martin’s Film Unit in 1976, and in 1985 became head of media art at Harrow School of Art, soon absorbed into the University of Westminster. In order to provide doctorates in art practice, in 1997 he was appointed research professor at the University of the Arts, London. In 2000 he and David Curtis established the British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection at UAL, dedicated to the work of UK and international moving image artists.
Le Grice’s installations were shown regularly in Europe and the US, with solo exhibitions in New York. In London, an exhibition at the Richard Saltoun gallery in 2015 was followed in 2024 by DNA / AND at the Velarde gallery, including early paintings and new collaborations with scientists utilising DNA coding to store data.
As well as at Tate Modern, his work is held at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and the National Film Library of Australia. The essays collected in his book Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age (2001) followed his earlier Abstract Film and Beyond (1977).
Students, working colleagues and friends found him both modest and generous. I first met him when he screened his films for the Student Film Society at the University of Kent at Canterbury, and we stayed in touch through Channel 4 commissioning.
In 1958 he met Judith Keast at a school dance, and they married three years later. She survives him, along with their children, Oliver and Josephine, and grandchildren, Ben and Jasmine.
Source: theguardian.com
