“A new track to understanding”: In conversation with Malcolm Le Grice
Dan Davies sat down with Malcolm to discuss his life, art and theories over the summer of 2024.
You grew up in Plymouth. What did your parents do?
They were very untypical. My father was a scrap metal dealer. He worked for a man from Kingsbridge, running his Plymouth store on the Barbican. They were buying stuff and selling it on; lead piping, rags and so on. They'd always have their foot under the weigh-in pedals so the amount that they paid for the scrap coming in was never what it was worth going out.
My father had greyhounds that he liked to run. He was a gambler and he drank well though he never was drunk. He was always out for pleasure. He was a sensualist, in a way.
My mother was a dressmaker in Plymouth. She got all of the Paris magazines. She could just look at them and make a pattern. She was very talented at dressmaking.
They both performed. My father played piano and piano accordion, albeit badly; my mother tried to sing opera. They were always at the Plymouth Theatre. We had a regular Friday night booking in the same seats on the front row of the circle.
Where did the interest in film begin?
When I was around 13 or 14, I think someone must have brought in a nine millimetre camera and sold it to my father as scrap. He liked playing around with things and every Friday, he'd send me to a local shop that rented out copies of old Hollywood movies. We’d have big family gatherings and I did all the film shows for them. I got very involved in the projection. I liked to improvise.
With Popeye the Sailor, I’d play the film backwards so as he was holding the can the spinach went in rather than out and the muscle in his arm went down rather than up. My uncles and aunts all sat around watching because there was no TV, of course. They loved it.
I think my concern with time first started when I was projecting for my family. It's one of the things about film, it can put a microscope on the time. It's a microscope because it’s not how you see normally.
The big influence, though, was being in a jazz band when I left secondary school. I got very taken with the improvisation and performance.
It was fortunate that when I got to Plymouth Art College, Mike Westbrook, who was a fellow student and a brilliant musician, was also there. He played trumpet and piano and formed his own Ellington-type band. We played every Saturday night at a big hall in Plymouth. I also toured around the west of England with a traditional jazz band.
Who were the chief influences on your early paintings and drawings?
At Plymouth Art College, we didn't know anything about contemporary art. We knew Impressionism onwards. My chief influence was, in a funny way, the Austrian expressionist Oskar Kokoschka. I didn't copy him but I was very influenced by the freedom of his work and the improvisation.
Gradually, my real interest turned to Cezanne and Matisse. Like the Impressionists, I was very theoretical about the underlying structures of colour theory. I saw Impressionism as a kind of parallel to the observational and theorising base of science.
Empiricism is the best example. You look and you see and you try to understand and not copy what you see but understand it through the act of observing and recording and so on. Cezanne was the key one, though I don't think I understood everything about him then.
I started to be theoretical about perspective and the alternatives to perspective. Cubism was about multi-viewpoint and it incorporated time. I became interested in the time-based aspect of making films. I was doing loop works. I became much more ‘parallel theoretical’.
My writing about film and video has been very theoretical, although I've always felt that the visual image was more important. The theory came out of what I was finding out by making art works.
You won a place to study at the Slade in London. How much of a shock was it swapping what you’ve described as conservative, post-war Plymouth for swinging, mid-1960s London?
When I came to the Slade in London I was out of my depth. It was a big shock for me. A lot of the other people at the Slade came from more artistically educated families. They knew a lot of the ‘in people’, whereas I got the counterculture from The Arts Lab, which was fantastic and everything they say it was. It was a meeting place for the counterculture.
Whilst I was at the Slade, I came across the work of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Rauschenberg was an influence, no question. His painting is like some of my films in terms of its conceptual structure. The images are made by somebody else and grabbed in.
At the Slade, you learned from ideas not style. Everything was open for discussion.
The Arts Lab on Drury Lane was founded in 1967 and quickly became a centre for London’s counter culture and alternative arts scene. When was your first contact with that scene?
The Arts Lab was the centre of counterculture in London. There was a new spirit in the air and an openness to experimentation. Everything was up for grabs. It was all about free rein creativity and getting involved. Learn and do as a collective rather than as individuals.
There was a big politicised counterculture in London. I was genuinely interested in socialism. I read Marx properly and called myself a Marxist, which I wasn't quite, but pretty much.
I was teaching at Saint Martins. The design department did animation and owned a 16 millimetre camera. I started to encourage my students, people like Roger Ackling, to make films but they were all very primitive.
I got an invitation to see the student films at the London School of Cinema in Covent Garden. Afterwards, I walked out at the same time as David Curtis, who had been a student with me at the Slade. He said, 'What did you think of that?' I said, 'I thought it was all a load of dreadful garbage.' He agreed.
I told him I’d been making some films that weren't like that at all. He had just got back from New York and had started a program of screenings at the Art Lab. He invited me down to see one of the programs. I took my film 'Castle 1' and showed it to him.
David was the first real facilitator and documenter and he gave great encouragement. He introduced me to the “Underground” as it was then.
How aware were you of the underground filmmaking scene in New York at that time?
All I knew about the New York underground was the notoriety of the bottoms film [Warhol’s ‘Taylor Mead’s Ass’, 1964]. I knew about Warhol, but I hadn't seen any of his films.
‘Castle 1’ was most influenced by literature. It was a parallel to Kafka’s ‘The Castle’. With a Kafka narrative, you never know where you are. To be honest, Kafka was the biggest influence artistically for me at that time.
On my way into Saint Martins each day, I’d walk along Old Compton Street in Soho, which was where all the film production companies were based. Any material that they didn't want, they just chucked in the bin. I was picking stuff out of bins and then going through it. I borrowed a projector. I only selected images that I thought had some retaining mystery to them; that didn't embody the narrative that they were intended to hold.
Which early works did you show at the Arts Lab?
‘China Tea’ (1965) is my first real film and the first double screen piece that I did. I showed it at the Arts Lab because David Curtis had a wide screen and two eight millimetre projectors.
It's about Cezanne and viewpoint. It’s a still life, but a still life with two moving cameras in counterpoint with each other. The Chinese tea set was connected to my fascination with Chinese and Japanese music. It was a tea set that my mother owned, and we stupidly took it to the charity shop. It was worth keeping.
My wife Judith is a pianist. When we first got married, we found this grand piano that we wanted to set up. It was in a dreadful state inside and I risked taking it all apart not knowing what I was doing. I restrung it and put new weights on the keyboard.
When I was just finishing getting it together for normal play I made a series of tapes using little twigs that vibrated between the strings when they were stuck.
I never know what I'm doing. When I start something I never know what will lead me to stop doing it. The works grow as they emerge.
Subsequently, very little of your work explored the most common art genres like still life and landscape.
The other exceptions are two computer works that explore still life through the computer programme, and a number of works that take a special view of narrative and landscape. Each of these involves a study of multi-viewpoint.
‘After Manet’ (1975) is clearly based on Manet’s ‘Le dejeuner sur l’herb’. It is situated in a country location and like the Manet original it has four performers. Though the action is strictly choreographed, all the four performers take responsibility for one of the four cameras. It is eventually projected on four screens. Any aspect of narrative and relationship between the characters is merely constructed by the viewer.
You became heavily involved with the London Film Cooperative, which was established in the basement of a shop, Better Books on Charing Cross Road, in 1966.
In the initial stage, they were totally influenced by the New York Film Cooperative. It was the Arts Lab that changed that by concentrating much more on the processes, on the equipment, on the production, on regular screenings. We had a regular screening for the London Co-op long before they ever thought of doing it in New York.
You were among a group that quickly took over the London Film Cooperative and was responsible for making significant changes, not least in setting up its own workshop.
I was on the British Film Institute Production Board, mainly because British institutions like to bring someone in who's opposing them. I set up a scheme to finance research into Britain’s emerging film production groups with a view to funding them rather than funding individual filmmakers who were making so-called English films, which were all rubbish.
I got them to change the policy and allow funding of groups for their film production. That was my real political work, getting inside those institutions, just like David Curtis getting inside the Arts Lab. We were doing political work. We knew what we were doing.
When I put together the film workshop, I was completely self-taught. I built equipment and had to learn as I went along. I got some things wrong, of course, but at that point I was more of an inventor.
Improvisation is incredibly important because the film laboratories didn't experiment at all. I got some money for the Film Co-op and bought this enormous piece of equipment, a French printing machine designed for copying negatives into positives. I started playing around with it, taping stills into the gate and putting colour filters through. That was all improvisation, teaching the thing itself how to do things it wasn't designed to do.
The London Film Cooperative became a school, like Impressionism. We were all talking to each other and looking at each other's works. We weren't necessarily copying other people, but we were influenced by them. We accepted influence through the Film Co-op being a collaborative, cooperative activity.
People could come in and make and print and develop their own films. I was printing other people's works, and they were learning how to do it and teaching people in their colleges. It was spreading like wildfire. Art departments were suddenly making films. The number of experimental filmmakers in London doubled in two years. Peter Gideal and I used to write up the listings for all the screenings for Time Out. We'd be praising young filmmakers that we'd hardly ever met.
Can you describe the creative atmosphere within the buildings occupied by LFMC?
There was a focused energy because there was an idealism. It was all based on an offshoot of hippie idealism, stirred in with a bit of ill-understood Marxism.
There were lots of direct political groups in London at the time. But rather than making overtly direct political films, like the Berwick Street Collective, I wanted to argue that there was a form of politics that comes through the development of culture. The politics of perception were about how you see things, how you understand things from what you've seen.
The politics came through the change in the way the audience's vision and expectation worked. It's a good theory but it was not understood by a culture that was dominated by literature, especially in England. England's culture from Shakespeare onwards is modelled by literature and the written word. I'm not against it, but I wanted something else for the image and the transfer of the image and then the transformation of the image.
The Film Co-op coalesced around structural considerations: how you made films reflecting the process of material and creation? We were concerned with the role of the audience in art, as well as the restrictive nature of commercial film and how it constructed a fake ‘understanding’ or purported to.
We also worked very closely with European artists such as Birgit and Willem Hein. Their experiments were very similar to our own.
You said you only selected images that had “some retaining mystery to them; that didn't embody the narrative that they were intended to hold”.
The basis of ‘Berlin Horse’ (1970) is an eight-millimetre film I shot in a village whilst on a tour of Germany with my wife. The only bit I was interested in was a section of a horse being led around a yard.
The film was all in original colour eight millimetre, so I did some reprints into black and white and played around with negative-positive superimpositions. Then I started to colourise by putting filters through the printer. I was interested in looping motions. At that time a lot of the musicians like Philip Glass were interested in looping. On my shelves, I had one of the films that I'd picked up in Soho. It was an Edison film of horses being led from a burning barn.
I resisted narrative and you see that in Berlin Horse. If there's no narrative the sequencing becomes a drama; from the black and white rotation to this incredible, spectacular recoloured section of the horses being led from the burning barn.
How did Brian Eno come to supply the soundtrack to ‘Berlin Horse’?
I showed some films out in the East End and Brian Eno was there. One of the films, ‘Reign of the Vampire’ (1970) was all loops. I’d made a soundtrack for it by looping music with a delay pattern. Eno said he was making music with loops like mine and did I want a soundtrack for any of my films? I had already put something on ‘Berlin Horse’ but I wasn't happy with it. He sent me a couple of tapes. It was not music made as a soundtrack, it was because he was interested in this loop structure. It's indulgent, of course, because it wasn't made as part of it; it just worked.
Why have you been so resistant to narrative in your filmmaking and writing?
The fundamentals of improvisation took me away from narrative. My films weren't narratives, although they did have what I call dramatology. It mattered that you saw one thing before you saw something else. The idea of developing drama, the element of predicting what's going to come next, is fundamental to all film. It just doesn't have to be a story.
I very quickly jumped into a direction that applied all the really significant aspects of improvisation and the use of images before meaning. Meaning was to be structured by the person viewing, not by my choice and intention.
In the late 1960s, I made a lot of films where I was experimenting with the printer and the processor I made myself, which meant they incorporated errors. I wrote that technology had replaced language. The trace of the technology was itself a major component of the language of film. For me, the language of film was not narrative.
‘Little Dog for Roger’ (1967) is probably the most radical film of any that I've made. It's a crossover of autobiographical and narrative structure, which is about incorporation of the machinery, the process as meaning, and the transformations that take place as a result of the process.
The original material was shot by my father on a 9.5mm camera. It’s of me, my brother and my mother running around with my dog on the fringes of Dartmoor. When I found it in the basement the film was a jumble of strips.
My first experiments were running a section of this film through the printer I had built. The projection was slipping, the screen was slipping and there were processing marks all over it. I decided that I was a lot more interested in the mistakes.
It follows the transformation from 9.5mm to being 16mm, which I did by putting the 9.5mm on top of an unexposed bit of 16mm under glass, dip processing it, and reworking the 16mm pieces. It's one of the films I like the most.
I like it because of the inbuilt sentimentality of filming something. It's like taking a selfie. Photographs are a mystery to me. They don't have any charge at all until they're at least 40 years old. What I've been doing gradually over the years is trying to recover the image in that recognisable way, so that you can now see what it was shot for by my father. The age has built itself into it.
Does anti-narrative equate to anti-emotion?
I don't know whether that's the case or not. I don't think we can avoid emotion. I would certainly say I don't manufacture it or encourage it. Emotion is a product of the way the elements of the film come together.
In most of my writing and most of my filmmaking, I'm resisting emotion. What is it? It's an endochrinal response. I never start to work from the point of view of aiming towards a certain sort of emotional content.
Your concern with the properties and passage of time has been a recurring theme, perhaps most overtly in ‘After Leonardo’ (1973).
As a young student I made a collection of images kept in a rough folder. I became interested in how the Mona Lisa had become the most accepted icon representing the female face. My prints had been pulled from a fashion magazine and as they gradually became crushed and damaged, they began to carry all the traces of ageing. In doing so they came to represent the way the cultural meaning of the work changed through time.
‘After Leonardo’ (1973) is an ongoing video and music performance piece. It’s also influenced by improvisation. It incorporates moving projection and live recording as part of the performance.
The work is also manifested in a photo collage and installation, which takes up the themes of cultural and historical changes in assumptions about the shifting idea of female beauty, the values of originality and meanings of art as a commodity.
Part of this is an assemblage titled ‘Before and After Leonardo’. Hanging inside a Perspex box are two images, one on each side. On one surface is a very poor black and white close-up of the centre of the Mona Lisa and on the reverse is a colour print of ‘Venus’ by Lucas Chranach.
Marcel Duchamp made a satirical Dadaist version of the Mona Lisa with a painted moustache, but in my various versions I wanted to concentrate on the shifting value and cultural meaning which became an invisible part of the icon.
How does the creative process begin for you?
Starting a work has to be a surprise to me. By the time it's put together, the end piece itself has to be a surprise to me. I never knew when I started a work what it was going to deal with and cover. I never knew. Right from the beginning.
I work very spontaneously and intuitively. The main influence is jazz. You start with an element of imagery but it's there to be modified and changed.
'Horror Film 1' (1971) is a shadow performance piece. When new people perform it, I make it very clear that they have to do it the way they want. They have to treat it as an open, improvisational base work, which they come to treat as their own. In the same way a jazz musician like Dizzy Gillespie might take a classic and when you get to the end of it, you never even recognised what it was.
‘Horror Film 1’ (1971) has been recently immortalised by being encoded on synthetic DNA and packaged into a tiny metal capsule predicted to last for one thousand years, as part of a cutting-edge art-science collaboration.
Before I started making films, I was interested in DNA. I did a lot of paintings that were structured like DNA. I am in a research project on DNA with Eurecom [a French graduate school and research centre in digital sciences]. The objective is to invent a new form of information storage.
The technology involved in the use of synthetic DNA is a fascinating method for long-term preservation. But my interest is now to go further and investigate the possibilities that DNA coding might have in the generation of new artworks. I want to understand the principles within DNA, which is that it keeps a blueprint pattern for making new versions of itself. It's about evolution and the set of rules within it. It’s fantastic that all this information, this system for change and evolution, is built into a set of five or six chromosomes. It is an area in which I’d very much like to begin to experiment, drawing on some of the original work on computer language structure.
What I enjoy is the way that finding something gives me a new track to understanding things.
You described yourself as an inventor. Was it that mindset that enabled you to become one of the first artists to truly embrace the digital realm?
I became interested in other art technologies, particularly computers. I was one of the first members of the Computer Art Society, which is where I met Alan Sutcliffe, who was a computer programmer with IBM. We made a work together [‘Typodrama’, 1970], a performance piece. I wrote a program with him, using a system for generating text and performance instructions. We performed it at the Computer Art Society’s first event.
I started to learn how to program properly and then I got a very unusual offer from the Atomic Energy Authority. They'd got a new piece of equipment for making animation films of atomic processes. It was a camera system that was mounted over a cathode ray tube but they didn't know how to use it.
They wanted to take mathematical descriptions of the atomic processes and turn them into animated films. I had to program stuff for them but it was actually for me. I used the time to start making computer generated films.
How did the programming and coding skills you acquired transfer into your art practice?
A major part of my innovation in film and video production came through this long period of developing computer film and video. I had to learn complex forms of computer programming
I was one of several artists involved in the development of loop-based music structures. Many of the filmmakers and musicians explored this by cutting and pasting film or magnetic tape, but I developed a particular method of generating permutative sequences using an early Atari computer. I produced a series of video works where the images and sounds were generated by the computer programme alone.
The computer became my prime tool during the 1980s, years before it became a mainstream creative tool. Direct coding of outcomes and early algorithmic experimentation interested me because it breaks down and questions the artist’s place within the process. It develops the idea of creation as a non-linear, possibly unintended process, almost certainly without a defined end point. The work is permanently re-mixable and versioned.
And have these ideas continued into your later works?
Yes. Each film is only realised through the actual points of decision and reflection; it is never preconceived. The works define themselves through an iterative involvement with the artist but are always more than his creation. There is room for continuous re-evaluation of meaning, or to assert that there actually is none!
My later films address the issue of the free and almost endless ability to document and create images digitally using cheap and readily available technology. They attempt to refine the ambiguity of choices within such endless source material, but never be trapped in the technology or the decision-making process.
The later films might look different but that could be down to the materials and the technology used in producing them. The ideas came out of what I was seeing on the screen and yet much of the same considerations are continuous throughout. By these I mean the juxtaposition of temporal and spatial themes; the consideration of the role and involvement of the audience or viewer; the rejection of narrative and ‘storytelling’ as the only valid approach to cinema; the part decision making plays versus what ‘happens’ in the creative process, and the actual act of creating; nostalgia, perception, visceral and sensual experience; fun. All of these play out throughout all the work right from the beginning.
Words, interview and photographs by Dan Davies.
