The Gidal Problematic

THE GIDAL PROBLEMATIC Sezgin Boynik ULTRA-LEFT FILM PRACTICE In 1989, a period of severe reaction against all forms of experimental art associated with the left, the filmmaker Peter Gidal published a book with the title Materialist Film, in which he distilled two decades of Structural-Materialist film history. The final four chapters of the book figure as the summation of the entire ‘problematic’ in Gidal’s theory and practice. ‘Problematic’, in the terminology of Gidal, has a precise meaning, it is a concentrate of general and pressing contradictions. It is, following Louis Althusser, a way to make a theoretical object visible, by looking at the levels beneath its manifesting features. Referred to as symptomatic reading, the problematic in this case is as much about absence as it is about presence.1 My aim in this text is to discuss these absent features of experimental film, which I consider to constitute the political dimension associated with these forms of art. On reading these final four chapters of Materialist Film, about anti-humanism, socialism, pessimism, production, and anonymity, one gets the impression that Gidal’s arguments in the late eighties for “a socialist film-politics” and for “ultra-leftist” artistic positions, are somewhat anomalous.2 Socialism, which was until then a key reference for oppositional cinema and critical theory, gave way to postmodernism. Jean-Luc Godard was recorded saying, already in 1983, that he had “given up politics”; in the same year, Julia Kristeva similarly declared her “farewell to politics”.3 Gidal interprets these statements as capitulations to conservatism: “giving up [on] politics is always a theme of the Right”.4 The problematic of Gidal was not to correct these revisionisms in cinema and in theory, but to completely abandon the perceptual mimesis, individualism, narrative, identification, and representation associated with this turn. This project, understandably, extends beyond Godard and Kristeva to include filmmakers and theoreticians who were claiming that themes of identity, narrative, and representation could herald new forms of socialism. In the late eighties, Gidal was perhaps the only filmmaker still insisting on the radical, anti-narrative principles of Structural-Materialist film, and a complete refusal to recognise any proposed usefulnesses for identity politics.5 1. 2. Ben Brewster, ‘Glossary’, in Louis Althusser, For Marx, NLB, London, 1977, pp. 253-254. Peter Gidal, Materialist Film, 33 3. 4. 1989, Routledge, London, p. 153. As quoted in Materialist Film, Godard, p. 153, Kristeva, p. 64. Ibid. The Gidal Problematic Half autonomous, half anonymous, the mode of this radical materialist film practice was bonded to “the desire to leave the cinema”,6 abandoning altogether the culture which Godard, alongside “The Berwick Street Film Collective, The London Women’s Film Group, Oshima, Comolli, Akerman, Mulvey/Wollen, Le Grice, etcetera” represented; the culture of art-film cinemas.7 Materialist films, like earlier Suprematist paintings, were not about something, whether or not this something was an abstract concept, such as process, dialectics or form – these films were themselves a thing, a process, a dialectics, a form.8 Gidal argued, and with his films demonstrated, that the material effect of avant-garde films was to bring forth the “filmic event”.9 This materiality (“materialist processes”) was not to be confused with materiality of photochemical processes; it required the articulation of theory to move forward. Ultimately, the “film as procedure of transformational dialectic” was to introduce a new experience, radical new change – the production of a new and active subjectivity. This also implied a new social practice, based on a different kind of viewing, where identification was resisted and the reproduction of recognisable signs was halted. Films within such practice were defined negatively, and their political features were radical critiques of humanism, which “is always a bourgeois phenomenon”; a distanciation 5. By that time his long-time collaborators had begun to include narrative in their films, as is evident from Gidal’s critique of Malcolm Le Grice’s (“not-quite-art movie/ not-quite-fully-formalist experimental film”) Finnegan’s Chin, 6. which focused on an “individual 7. man” and, for Gidal, betrayed the collectivist and anonymous principles of Structural-Materialist filmmaking. It should be noted that this critique was not only an attack on artistic-formal capitulation but also on the institutional and economical-political dimensions, i.e. ideological critique of the subsidising of avant-garde film by the BFI under the new direction of Peter Sainsbury, previously a head of production board at the BBC, who sought to popularise the London Filmmakers’ Co-op film pro- 34 duction through spectacular methods. William Fowler, ‘Longform Experimental Film and BFI Production Board’, Moving Image Review & Art Journal, 6:1-2, December 2017, pp. 169-170. Gidal, Materialist Film, p. 160. Peter Gidal, ‘The Anti-Narrative’, Screen, 20: 2, 1979, p. 77. His particular aversion was towards independent cinema and movies smuggled into festivals as ‘experimental’ and ‘avant-garde’. Gidal’s review in Studio International of the Edinburgh Film Festival’s avantgarde programme is well known (“Jeanne Dielman is a profoundly reactionary film”, Peter Gidal, ‘Some Brief Notes on the Edinburgh Film Festival 1975’, Studio International, no. 978, November-December, 1975, p. 250). Perhaps his most Sezgin Boynik from dominant forms of mimesis, phallocracy, and narcissism; detachment from popular forms of optimism and altered the relations within the production of meaning, which is what makes this practice political, that is, “transforming class and sex positions, both subjectively and objectively”.10 Now, the question is, how does this politics produce anything substantial, other than the new film viewer, and new film forms? What is the usefulness of this politics, where are its tangible structures, how can it be measured, if at all? Or, as Mike Dunford asked, “What is left in experimental film? Is it so totally reactionary that nothing of value can be extracted from it?”11 Gidal’s answer was to refuse to engage with these parameters, of worn-out bourgeois criteria. According to him, materialist film’s subjectivity, and its radical ultra-left practice is based on emptiness, hollowness, meaninglessness, and nothingness. Concepts alien to any known version of leftist socialism. The text of Gidal, that we publish here for the first time, is one such answer to this question of ‘usefulness’. It frontally challenged the Benjaminian arguments around the formalistic implications of artistic tendencies. Indeed, Gidal wanted to show that Benjamin’s dictum, which claims “an author who teaches writers nothing teaches no one” is rather more complex than its usual use in prevalent academic writings would assume.12 8. bitter critique of the ‘movie’ invasion into experimental film is his review of the Knokke EXPRMNTL Film Festival. Gidal opposed Dušan Makavejev’s presence in the festival, which he deemed a “mystery to all”: “a rather successful sensationalist filmmaker with a film school notion of how to put a film together but a Pepsi advertiser’s insight into what sells under consumer capitalism, […] exploitative, racist, and sexist, […] a thoroughly disgusting filmmaker”, Peter Gidal, ‘The 5th Experimental Film Festival at Knokke/Heist, Belgium’, Studio International, no. 974, MarchApril, 1975, p. 137). This “aboutness” of process is reflected in Gidal’s reading of Mike Dunford’s work, who was involved in the London 35 Filmmakers’ Co-op and experimented along the lines of the Structural-Materialist critique of representation. Gidal discusses Dunford’s film, Still Life with Pear (1973), as not a process itself but as a “window to process”, suggesting that the reference to the dialectics of process in Dunford was not transformative but “illustrative”, Materialist Film, p. 32. 9. Gidal, Materialist Film, p. 18. 10. Gidal, Materialist Film, p. 20, 33, 152, 155. 11. Mike Dunford, ‘Experimental/ Avant-Garde/Revolutionary/Film Practice’, Afterimage, No. 6, 1976, p. 109. 12. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’, translated by Edmund Jephcott, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other The Gidal Problematic Today, contemporary practices of experimental filmmaking, or artists’ moving image-making, as it is now widely and synonymously known, has relapsed into empty formalism, or “bourgeois formalism”, and has opened the doors wide to narrative and representation. We perhaps need to refresh Gidal’s problematic. “What is thus lacking is a blast of problematic at any one moment which could position a viewer very differently from comfortable abstract, ‘pure’, light and grain”.13 As historical-materialists and Marxists we should be able to do this, and see what is there to be salvaged after the blast. Gidal’s films do not need any curatorial or theoretical advocacy, their artistic qualities will endure for many decades to come. I am here interested to discuss why such a radical artistic position defined through negativity needed a leftist political justification? By publishing the essay, ‘The Author as Producer of Nothing’, and by engaging with the radical output of the Structural-Materialist films, our thesis is that the “nothingness” Gidal speaks of, could be an entry point to a social world of pure abstraction. Marxists have to be able to speak about avantgarde art forms that are completely useless for the objectives of dominant cultural institutions. POLITICAL ART WITHOUT SUBJECT To undertake such analysis we must begin from the film itself. No one has insisted on the radical autonomy of film as fervently as Gidal did by opposing any forms of identification with exteriority, context, and history, and the inclusion of any recognisable reference. He opposed the holding, arresting, pinning-down, or the otherwise reduction of film into a known, existing reference. His engagement with film required a constant struggle, Writings, Harvard University Press, 2008, p. 89. Gidal similarly considers Bertolt Brecht to be a victim of comparable smplification. He was against the misuse of Brecht by academics who in spite of the constant use of the words ‘contradiction’ and ‘problematic’, constructed an “unproblematic” Brecht, used for “the good conscience of avant-garde formalism”. Peter Lehman, ‘Politics, History and Avant-Garde: An Interview with Peter Gidal’, Wide Angle: A Film Quarterly of Theory, Criticism, and Practice, 5: 2, 1983, p. 76. 36 13. Gidal, Materialist Film, p. 15. 14. Nicky Hamlyn, ‘Structuralist Traces’, The British Avant-Garde Film, 1926-1995: An Anthology of Writings, edited by Michael O’Pray, University of Luton Press, 1996, p. 224. 15. Ibid. 16. The mention of abstract light and grain here refers to the grain of Brakhage, who was both making and advocating for Structuralist films, and from whom Gidal was keen to differentiate his own position. The most convincing criteria in Gidal’s demarcation is the political and theoretical one. Sezgin Boynik and questioning, a ceaseless working-through. Despite being ascetic and militant, this involvement was also about art and aesthetics. As Nicky Hamlyn noted, “for all his anti-aestheticism, Gidal’s films cannot but be experienced as aesthetic”.14 Radical autonomy permits them to be viewed as modernist art-works, or as “the green cast and sensuous movement of the grain”,15 not unlike the work of Stan Brakhage (whom Gidal saw as a mystificatory and individualistic structuralist, i.e. a non-materialistic-structuralist16). Deke Dusinberre, who wrote the first major theoretical treatment on Gidal’s films described his device as “consistent oxymoron […] extending strategies of contradiction and hyperbole to every level of [filmic] construction”.17 Still, this did not imply that the films made were of glitchy, constructivist, mathematical, rational, or mechanical-like freeze-stop forms. As Dusinberre suggests, despite the impression within them that “there’s no way to go on”, as in Beckett’s plays, Gidal’s films had a particular charm and flow. Contrary to Jean-Luc Comolli’s scorn for Gidal’s work, that is was “cinema by and for professors”,18 there were also assessments that found these films “fascinating, involving, pleasurable”, and discovered in their forms a “sense of elan”, as Laura Mulvey described.19 In a more recent evaluation, the scholar Steven McIntyre recognised in these films a “contemplative” and “even spiritual” levels bringing forth the “intense aesthetic effect”.20 In other words, there is something classical in these films, transcending the context and conjuncture of their production; something that alludes to eternity and the void in the midst of dialectics and constant transformation.21 As Malcolm Le Grice, the renowned experimental filmmaker, 17. Deke Dusinberre, ‘Consistent 21. Gidal was against the classical Oxymoron: Peter Gidal’s aspect of experimental films which he recognised in Hollis Rhetorical Strategy’, Screen Franmpton’s obsession with the No. 18, Summer 1977, p. 80. old and classical. (Peter Gidal, 18. This is from the ‘Discussion’ section of The Cinematic ‘Interview with Hollis Frampton’, Apparatus, edited by Teresa October, Spring 1985). de Lauretis and Stephen Heath, The films coming out of the Macmillan Press, London, 1980, London Co-op were “pure p. 171. structuralism, less connected 19. Mulvey, The Cinematic with traditional romantic or Apparatus, p. 167. classical notions” (Peter Gidal, 20. Steven McIntyre, ‘Peter Gidal’s ‘Film as Film [1972]’, A PersAnti-Narrative: An Art of Reprisal pective on English Avant-Garde Film, Arts Council of Great Reappraised’, The Moving Britain/British Council, 1978, Image Review & Art Journal, p. 23). Here we allude to 2:1, April 2013, pp. 31-33. 37 The Gidal Problematic argued of Gidal’s films, that, despite their difficult form these films “are at one level predicated on the sensual lure”.22 The filmmaker Nicky Hamlyn’s analysis of Room Film 1973 can provide some insight about workings of Gidal’s art. For Hamlyn, the principal device of experimental film evolved around “the index/apparatus problematic”, referring to “the practice of putting the indexical moment of the photo-recording process into tension with the peculiarities of the apparatus”.23 The technical language of filmmaking aside, this meant to question the possibilities of representing the three-dimensional pro-filmic world within the materiality of two-dimensional film. The core problematic is about “representation”, which experimental films of the time succeed in engaging with to varying degrees. Gidal, according to Hamlyn, plays on ideological and social expectations, or the automatic and natural synchronisation of the apparatus/index tension; he disturbs the natural construct of this tension by continuous withdrawal from the known and the expected. As a result, his work is critical of film’s “supposed efficacy in representing three-dimensional space convincingly or exhaustively”.24 Hamlyn argues this is the political project of Gidal, without needing to refer to any political subject. This impossibility of representation, and the tension it implies, is the core problematic; it is also the field where the politics of this engagement is constituted, not outside of the film. “The viewing itself becomes a politicising experience”, as Hamlyn writes elsewhere, “continually questioning and revising interaction with the film”.25 According to this account, Gidal did not resist representation only because he deemed it an ideological failure; he was rather concerned with the insufficiencies in adequately representating any given subject.26 This indeed had a political AGAINST BOURGEOIS ACADEMIA An important part of Gidal’s project was writing, which was work comparable to filmmaking. What defined and differentiated Structural-Materialist film practice and theory from other existing oppositional and experimental film practices was the theory that “functioned as a basis of their own practice”, precisely as a theory of theoretical practice.28 Keen to differentiate this theory from “film scholarship, which is as dull and as politically retrograde as sociology”, Gidal worked on a project unlike the “bourgeois academia” of democratic liberal representation where “a variety of strongly contradictory texts sit happily side by side”.29 The power of Gidal’s problematic was based on this polemical aspect, today absent from what we know as experimental, artistic, or contemporary practices. Avant-garde film writing also had an organisational dimension; it strove to demarcate Structural-Materialist films from leftist narrative films, to completely separate, and emancipate them from filmmakers like Godard, Straub/Huillet, etc. Peter Wollen’s text ‘The Two-Avant-Gardes’, which proposed to synthesise the first, Godard-Straub/Huillet “signification” line with the second structuralist, experimental “material” line, was a target of Gidal’s, who insisted on a bold separation and demarcation between the two. The history of this separation was slow, though we might mention that both Wollen’s ‘Two Avant-Gardes’ and Gidal’s ‘Theory and Definition’ appeared in a classical that is less specific, in line with the Baudelairean notion of classical, which argues for the capacity of artworks to refer beyond their apparent historical mode; to transcend referentiality. The notion has nothing to do with classical institutions. 22. Malcolm Le Grice, ‘Some Introductory Notes on Peter Gidal’s Films and Theory [1979]’, Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age, British Film Institute, London, 2001, p. 74. In another text, Le Grice wrote a meta-theory of experimental which could be argued for over film’s ontology, as something that 300 pages, and deduce from one could be explained with the right given, via metaphor, a total world theoretical schemes, including of political meanings. This then ontology, knowledge production, denies both the materiality of the etc. Gidal opposed this translation filmic process and the political and application by claiming for specificity at hand and the a more radical detachment from abstract/general theories-positions the existing models of cinema taken on.” Gidal, Materialist Film, theory. André Bazin was definitely p. 78. 28. Peter Gidal, ‘Theory and Definition not a reference for Gidal. of Structural/Materialist Film’, Peter Wollen, ‘“Ontology” and Structural Film Anthology, edited “Materialism” in Film’, Screen, by P. Gidal, British Film Institute, 17: 1, Spring 1976. London, 1978, p. 11. 27. “A film ‘about’ a rent-strike needs to annihilate the general principles 29. Gidal, Materialist Film, p. xiv. 38 23. 24. 25. 26. that Room Film 1973 is “a work of art” questioning “the abstract direction of modern art”. Malcolm Le Grice, ‘Vision’, Studio International, No. 962, January 1974, p. 36. Nicky Hamlyn, Film Art Phenomena, British Film Institute, London, 2003, p. 186. Hamlyn, Film Art Phenomena, p. 131. Hamlyn, ‘Structuralist Traces’, p. 220. Peter Wollen’s theorisation of Structural-Materialist films was an attempt to come up with Sezgin Boynik consequence, as he has often remarked on the inadequacies of film and its inability to represent a rent-strike, the argument often used against social cinema platforms active in the UK in the seventies.27 39 The Gidal Problematic the same issue of Studio International. This separation was further drawn in the Structural Film Anthology, edited by Peter Gidal, and published by the British Film Institute in 1976. The anthology itself was published to coincide with a series of eighteen programmes, the ‘Structural Film Retrospective’, at the National Film Theatre in London, in 1976. No longer underground, nor artistic in the way they are today considered in and by contemporary art institutions, these abstract, avant-garde films, by the mid-seventies, had seized a new legitimacy. As Ben Brewster, a translator of Althusser and the editor of Screen, wrote in his review of the anthology, this opposition to the reproduction of ideology “required a genuine theory”.30 MATERIALIST THEORY OF NOTHINGNESS One of the key concepts for avant-garde film practices of the time was anonymity, understood as being collective, against authorship, materialist, and process-based. This was not a mere application of revolutionary avant-garde artists’ theses on the dissolution of individualism (auteurism) in collective creativity. Gidal and Le Grice were not advocating for something like Dziga Vertov’s collective “We”, which was exactly what Jean-Luc Godard was doing with the Dziga Vertov Group, mimicking the 1920s Soviet communist collectivism in the milieu of the seventies Paris bourgeoisie.31 Gidal had a different position, he argued that anonymity “must in fact be created into the filmic event itself”.32 This builtin anonymity could bring forth a filmic event that was democratising, subjecitiving, egalitarian, collective, and anti-traditional. He discovered this rare anonymity in works of Andy Warhol, Lis Rhodes, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Rose Lowder, Kazimir Malevich, and Viktor Shklovsky. Of these names, I would propose that Malevich best represents a precursor to this idea of anonymity, and align his Suprematist non-objective forms with the materialist and secular anonymity Gidal speaks of. If nothing else, this will help us to conceive the tangibility of “nothingness” in avant-garde art and materialist film. Malevich wrote dozens of texts on film; unfortunately, Gidal mentions none of them in his writing. Most memorably he wrote, in 1925, that “cinema-producers have not escaped the grip of tradition, and images triumph on the screens”,33 anticipating the Structural-Materialist reticence to use anthropomorphic images in film. Stephen Dwoskin is among the first who compared Gidal’s films to Malevich’s paintings, “in which he made the jump from negative to positive by placing a black square on a white background, thereby recognizing the void”.34 The comparison Dwoskin, himself a filmmaker, makes is interesting, but shouldn’t stop there; for this comparison we need a more radical understanding of void. The Suprematist void is more than a lack or an emptiness; it also resists being filled with meaning. Malevich fully expressed this position in his ‘Suprematism’ text from 1927, which was not published during his lifetime. He wrote the text as an addition to Non-Objectivity, published by the Bauhaus School in Germany. In the late twenties, he was disappointed with the utilisation of a simplified Suprematist apparatus by international constructivist avantgarde architects, designers, and painters. He tried to defend the radical gesture of the Suprematist world-view, that of pure nonobjectivity, by all and any means. ‘Suprematism’, is written from that context, where Malevich defined the Black Square as “the sensation of the desert, non-existence, in which the square-form 30. Ben Brewster, ‘Afterword’, Structural Film Anthology, p. 144. 31. In 1975, Viktor Shklovsky criticised Godard in his book on Eisenstein, exactly on these grounds. Shklovsky wrote that “phenomena in art reiterate with occasional and random exactness; they emerge, by changing their functional meaning. Terminologies should not be transposed from one field to another.” Shklovsky compares the Dziga Vertov Group’s actualisation of the slogan “death to the film author” Kuleshov was about moving Borgen, Copenhagen, 1968, p. forward. The conflict of Godard, 232. The most extensive overview where he tries to block the of Malevich’s involvement with forward movement of art, is a story film, including his collaboration with Hans Richter, can be found in of the past. It is the red light in the place where there is no chance Margarita Tupitsyn, Malevich and for repair.” Viktor Shklovsky, Film, Yale University Press, 2002. ‘Sergei Eisenstein’, Zamak Kulture, The White Rectangle: Writings No. 3, Vrnja ka Banja, 1975, on Film, edited by Oksana p. 175-176. Bulgakowa, Potemkin Press, 32. Gidal, Materialist Film, p. 156. 2002, is another good publication 33. Kazimir Malevich, ‘And Images on this subject, including all Triumph on the Screens’, Essays Malevich’s writings on film. on Art 1915-1928, Vol. 1, 34. Stephen Dwoskin, Film Is… The translated by Xenia GlowackiInternational Free Cinema, Peter Prus, edited by Troels Andersen, Owen, London, 1975, p. 175. 40 to Vertov’s original slogan from the 1920s and points to this simplified transposition of political subjectivity to artistic subjectivity. With this slogan, Vertov, in the 1920s, was targeting the film practice of Eisenstein, claiming that dialectical film should be emancipated from art. With the same slogan and for the same reason, Godard also criticised Eisenstein in the 1970s, accusing him of “revisionism.” But the conflict, as Shklovsky writes, “between the living Eisenstein, the living Vertov and the living Sezgin Boynik 41 The Gidal Problematic appears as the first non-objective element of sensation”,35 and refused to attach the Black Square to an available meaning. The non-existence, the void, of the Black Square needs to remain in that form, as Malevich wrote, “the hollow remains a hollow, not a nest”.36 Gidal can be compared to Malevich in this perseverance of the void-form, which I argue is the core of his radical position on anonymity. In ‘Theory and Definition’, Gidal points at the scarcity of these artistic experiments. Process in art, as a general definition, is in fact vacuous, but this “vacuous definition is nevertheless filled, ideologically rigidified”.37 The StructuralMaterialist project was to find ways to resist this filling-up with conjuncture – with available, obvious and common references. Today, the Malevich-Gidal line of uncommon materiality would raise the hairs of contemporary art curators and institutional activists, but for the avant-garde project this was the only way to work with the “unnaturalness, ungiveness, and arbitrariness” of the signifier, and of meaning.38 Meaninglessness is at the root of the Gidal’s problematic; it is the theoretical possibility for the Gidalian world-view inspired by Beckettian entropy, that “there’s no way to go on”.39 It is a strong theoretical demarcation, but also the cause of many polemics and misunderstandings. Without addressing this concept any attempts at engagement with the possible political dimensions of Gidal’s problematic would be futile. POLITICAL PAIN OF MEANINGLESSNESS Meaninglessness in the work of Gidal has many attributes: non-effectiveness, denial, arbitrariness, immeasurability… When challenged with criticisms of meaninglessness, as indeed he was in many recorded interviews and public discussions, Gidal’s counter-argument was based on negative displacement and was usually derived from the sources of “anti-humanistic Marxism”, claiming that bourgeois humanism is rooted in empty ideological optimism, which he deflects with political pessimism of Althusserian anti-humanism. At times he compares his negativity to Bakunin’s anarcho-pessimism that “everything is 35. Kazimir Malevich, ‘Suprematism [1927]’, The Artist, Infinity, Suprematism: Unpublished Writings, 1913-1933, Vol. IV, translated by X. Hoffmann, edited by T. Andersen, Borgen, Copenhagen, 1978, p. 146. 36. Ibid., p.156. Perhaps one of the 42 reasons why this text fell into oblivion is a line arguing that “this Suprematist element is equally unacceptable for the bourgeois and the Socialist-Bolshevik structures of life”, p. 155. 37. Gidal, ‘Theory and Definition’, p. 7. 38. Gidal, ‘Theory and Definition’, p. 8. Sezgin Boynik hopeless”,40 or argued for a “politics of denial”, for a Bakuninist, non-authoritative position;41 or more generally about a “simultaneous contradictory effect […] of the construction of meaninglessness” against the pro-filmic, which is “stamped by bourgeois (middle-class) meaning”, and added that the “minute this (meaning) holds there is a political pain”.42 Thus, we understand the meaninglessness as against the bourgeois predominant meaning, against middle-class domestic obviousness. The first appearance of meaninglessness as a fully developed concept was in ‘The Anti-Narrative (1978)’, an essay published in Screen journal. The concept was introduced to further develop the question of filmic representation. Earlier Gidal described the act of viewing Structural-Materialist films as “watching oneself watching”, an obscure materialist reflexiveness based on a “1:1 relation between work and viewer (‘production’ time and ‘reading’ time).”43 This description required a reformulation of experimental film’s temporality based on “real time”, which concretely meant opposing any retrospective interpretations of filmic presence, as is usually done in mainstream illusionistic films, but also in pseudo-documentary works. Gidal defended Structural-Materialist films as works that do not document – or represent – anything; or as he consistently underlined, “a film is not a window to life”.44 This autopoietic, self-contending, self-reflexive process of viewing needed a new definition of subjectivity, based on “non-hierarchical and cool” activity, with a categorical refusal to be about anything. It incorporated a definition of time that was a filmic time (“material film-time”), not in the same way as it was understood by expanded cinema, alluding to displacement or reconfiguration of the normative everyday temporality. The aim was to work on the 1:1 relation, enabling the film to be present through its materiality, without any associative implications, something which Gidal described as “memory-less carrying on”.45 In principle, this endless process is useless activity – it’s strongest feature is when nothing is aimed but could “disrupt the ‘normal’ cultural codes”.46 Accordingly then, in order for this 39. Quote is taken from Dusinberre, ‘Consistent Oxymoron’, p. 80. 40. Lehman, ‘Politics, History and Avant-Garde: An Interview with Peter Gidal’, p. 77. 41. ‘Flashbacks: Peter Gidal’, Filmwaves, No. 7, Spring, 1999, p. 20. 43 42. Yann Beauvais, Alain-Alcide Sudre and Rose Lowder, ‘An Interview with Peter Gidal’, Scratch, No. 6, 1985, p. 18,19. 43. Gidal, ‘Theory and Definition’, p. 8. 44. Ibid., p. 1, 10. 45. Gidal, Materialist Film, p. 55. 46. Ibid., p. 6. The Gidal Problematic strange and radical materialist film event, or presence, to take place the viewer had to be a “not-knower”.47 Michael Snow, the Canadian Structuralist filmmaker remarked after seeing Room Film 1973, that it seemed “as if it were made by a blind man”.48 Similarly, A.L. Rees alluded to this blackout, or “emptying out”, describing the film as eknosis, meaning the “absence of activity”.49 A film practice in which one watches oneself watching, is a complicated way to postulate a subjectivity of the viewer engaging with the “unnaturalness, ungiveness, arbitrariness” of the signifier. The lessness with which it associates was not an “empty signifier”50 nor an absence of activity; it was a “materialist practice of the production of meaning”.51 Despite all these measures taken to oppose the nihilistic trappings of meaninglessness, and its obscurantist implications, it was challenged by few, who instead noted that Gidal’s materialism fell back “into a metaphysics of presence”.52 The ‘Anti-Narrative’ settles an account with these metaphysical remnants by way of political references. When Gidal writes that “narrative is inertia”, he refers to the production of meaning which blocks, arrests, freezes, and which are part of “current dominant forms of expression”.53 To delineate the materialist meaning-production (i.e. meaninglessness) from the dominant forms of meaning-production, and to achieve a complete separation from the remnants of idealism and metaphysics, a more explicit political reference was needed than the speculative critique of the inertia of the narrative. The only place where Gidal could find this culture emancipated from bourgeois-form was the culture of communist and socialist organisations. This is yet another, more concrete, political dimension of Gidal’s problematic. SOCIALIST PRINCIPLES Gidal argued that political problems “cannot be solved [by] the viewing [of film]”,54 but he continuously made use of explicitly political references in his artistic arguments. In his earlier text defending the ethics of experimental films as “non-authoritarian p. 252. 47. Ibid., p. 56. 48. Gidal, ‘Theory and Definition’, p.17. 51. Gidal, ‘Theory and Definition’, p. 8. 49. A.L. Rees, A History of Experi52. Ben Brewster, ‘Afterwords’, p. 144, referring to Ann Cottringer’s mental Film and Video, Palgrave, BFI, London, 2011, p. 103. article ‘On Peter Gidal’s Theory The Michael Snow quote is from and Definition of Structural/ ‘Theory and Definition’. Materialist Film’, Afterimage, 50. Gidal, Understanding Beckett, No. 6, 1976. 44 Sezgin Boynik emancipation”, he noted that “if anything, a Marxist aesthetic lies behind these films”.55 The Marxist aesthetic of abstract films was not the same as the Marxism of earlier avant-garde art. With the exception of Mike Dunford who explicitly referred, including in his films, to political subjects, the other main practitioners of British avantgarde films (including Structural-Materialist films), did not engage openly with political issues. Malcolm Le Grice has defended Marxism more or less as historical consciousness and the ethics of labour processes.56 Gidal’s Marxism does not derive from Marx, nor from the political socialism of humanist labour values. His is an anti-humanist Marxism, of a particular Leninist faction. Needless to say, through the filter of Althusser. Whatever the source, the leftist politics of Gidal was always radical and extreme. The “socialist principles”,57 of Gidal can be divided in three: 1. As being aware of the economic and institutional background of filmic production, including Co-op economies and organisational forms. In this case the context, and the detailed references to democratric and egalitarian principles (anti-discriminatory principles regarding gender, labour, racial, differences) are often described as socialist, leftist, or Marxist, reminiscent at time to the self-management principles of socialism;58 2. As a philosophical argument for the practice of dialectics, and the working in opposites. Most of the references to leftist literature are via citations, often the same one, to Lenin’s Empirio-criticism. These references can also be traced in the radical materialist logic of Lenin’s thought of ceaseless working counter to bourgeois culture, which corresponds to the Structural-Materialist concept of constant dialectics, etc Diametrically opposed to multifaceted and liberal proliferation of different positions. Often socialism here refers to uncompromising fight against capitalist/bourgeois culture; 3. As an attitude against liberal bourgeois humanist concepts. In this regard the political argument is made via Marx’s Gotha Program, and its uncompromising critique of socialdemocratic recuperation. The introduction to Materialist Film announces this in the clearest way: the form of writing “not as 53. 54. 55. 56. Gidal, ‘The Anti-Narrative’, p. 89. Gidal, Materialist Film, p. 160. Gidal, ‘Film as Film’, p. 23. Malcolm Le Grice sees materialism in films as realism, which is possible with “active, participatory structuring of actuality”, Le Grice, Experimental 45 Cinema in the Digital Age, p. 170. 57. Peter Gidal, ‘Technology and Ideology in/through/and AvantGarde Film: An Instance’, The Cinematic Apparatus, p. 154. 58. Gidal spoke about these ironically as “little socialist practices”. The Gidal Problematic a social-democratic representation”. Despite Marx’s authority, the dominant figures in this version of “socialism” are Lenin and Althusser. The core argument of this position is to defend the non-eclectic methodology and the clarity, which is the dominant feature of Gidal’s films and writings. AGAINST OPPORTUNISM In Gidal’s ‘The Anti-Narrative’, Lenin is mentioned several times. First, when comparing the unceasing processes of materialist filmmaking to Leninism, in its constant problematisation, and its “working through”.59 This is the Lenin of Althusser who, “knew that the [revolutionary] task had to be worked on every minute, that it was a long experimentation involving huge risks”.60 On a less speculative ground, the whole argument of ‘The Anti-Narrative’ around the necessity of theory is built through historical reference on Lenin’s different observations on ultra-left manifestations. Gidal wrongly links Lenin to the restoration of revolutionary subjectivity, which he implies to be Lenin’s subjectivity, but he is right in finding in this Soviet historical episode a similarity to his and other filmmakers’ position in 1978. Lenin, on different occasions, had differing commentaries on the misgivings of varying ultra-leftist positions; i.e. Bolshevik underground ultra-leftism, the ultra-leftism of Italian factory occupations, and the infantile and impatient Dutch anarcho-syndicalist ultraleftism, etc. Gidal concludes that despite Lenin’s seeming inconsistencies, all these variations direct to one thing, to the importance of “mass organisation and theory”.61 Often, Lenin is a reference used in the critique of a reactionary idealism of positivist and empiricist understanding of materialism, which Gidal used to label filmmakers who focused only on the empiricism of photochemical processes. They were vulgar materialists of sorts, sounding Lenin’s warning “that often mechanistic materialism is the great danger, idealism the lesser”.62 Another of Gidal’s frequent references to Lenin has to do with dialectics, from the Materialism and Empirio-criticism, which state “For objective dialectics the absolute is also to be found in the relative. The unity, the coincidence, identity, resultant force, of opposites, is conditional, temporary, transitory, and relative”.63 On the second page of Understanding Beckett, Lenin 59. Gidal, ‘The Anti-Narrative’, p. 91. 60. Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideology State Apparatuses, Verso, London, 2014, p. 91. 46 61. Gidal, ‘The Anti-Narrative’, p. 91. 62. Gidal, Materialist Film, p. 105. 63. Gidal, ‘Theory and Definition’, p17. The same quotation from Lenin is used as an epigram to the essay Sezgin Boynik appears as a theoretician of oxymoronic contradictions, or as a theoretician of “unity of opposites”.64 Today, Gidal defends these obscure references to Lenin as a symptom of his struggle against liberal-bourgeois “socialdemocratic” humanism. This also explains why Marx is so seldom referred to in his writing, and when he does it is through Critique of Gotha Program, a polemical text that Marx did not published during his lifetime, that criticised the Lassallian consolidation of the German Social-Democratic Party towards liberalism, filled with empty and ideological phrases. Gidal recently commented on his use of Lenin as an aberration, an anomaly, and as a literary device for introducing the contradiction in the text.65 Leaving aside this current revision, Lenin, for Gidal, was always a symbol of anti-opportunism and anti-eclecticism, a symbol of the extreme position, as for example, when he wrote dismissively about experimental filmmakers using narrative as leading towards “what Lenin called ‘objective opportunism’”.66 Malevich also wrote about Lenin. His first published text in German translation in 1924, translated by El Lissitzky, was simply called ‘Lenin’. The text itself is about non-objective painting. The reference to a revolutionary figure is introduced in order to make an argument for a revolutionary art practice; not to attach the art practice to revolutionary institutions. This is exactly how Gidal’s political references function: Politics is introduced as a possibility to continue with art. Politics ends in the same place where it starts; in the realm of art. Both Malevich, and Gidal, needed extreme arguments to arrive at this conclusion. In other words, Gidal has bent the stick “too far” in a political direction to make an argument for avant-garde filmmaking. PHILOSOPHY THAT LEADS NOWHERE We have mentioned Althusser’s influence on Gidal a few times in this text. Now it is time to look more attentively at this link, and see if through this connection we can gain a different perspective on non-reproductive and anti-representational sources in the Gidal problematic. There is hardly a text on film written in the UK in the seventies that does not make reference to Althusser. These quotations were often short-cuts to many complicated ‘Against Sexual Representation in Film’, published in Screen in 1984. 64. Peter Gidal, Understanding Beckett, Macmillan Press, 47 London, 1986, p. 2. 65. Peter Gidal, ‘Introduction’, Flare Out: Aesthetics 1966-2016, edited by Mark Webber, The Visible Press, London, 2016, p. 33. The Gidal Problematic discussions. They often included gross misunderstandings and simplifications. Colin McCabe, in the introduction to his collected essays, most of which were published in the journal Screen, wrote that Althusser provided for Screen an “intellectual space in which a specific analysis of a cultural form, in this case film and cinema, [that could] struggle within various institutions, without necessarily taking up positions automatically designated as left”. In other words, Althusser enabled “one to have serious commitment to the democratic institutions of capitalism”; 67 which in that particular moment was provided by Eurocommunist currents. McCabe’s use of Althusser was to combine leftist avant-garde art forms with right-wing liberal politics; a form of capitulation Gidal was utmostly careful to avoid. Gidal’s Althusser was not the Althusser of subjectivation and interpellation. His favourite Althusser quote is about history being a process without a subject, but there are further quotations about recognition, representation, and reproduction, core to anti-idealist materialist projects, both in theory, and in film practice. It is often forgotten that at the core of StructuralMaterialist film theory was not to oppose the narrative, identification, and illusionism per se, but to investigate the “problematic of production versus reproduction”.68 The theory of interpellation, central to a crude, revisionist Althusserianism, is deduced from the essay ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, perhaps the most widely read text of Althusser’s. Towards the end of this text Althusser mentions “actors”, as in the “mise-en-scène of interpellation [that are] reflected in the very structure of all ideology”.69 From this point of view, it is easy to understand the scholarly enthusiasm for comparing the state ideological apparatus with cinematic apparatus; but the often neglected aspect is that these dynamics are ever-repeating, eternal, and “timeless”. Althusser envisaged the Ideological State Apparatuses as fragile apparatuses, which are at the same time paradoxically extraordinarily strong and tough.70 It is this characteristic, which is more cinematic than the mise-en-scène analogy, incidentally reminiscent of the description used by Gidal, Le Grice and Rhodes about the built-in-contradictions in filmic productions of meaning. Underneath the Althusserian theory of reproduction resides a very unstable mechanism, similar to the “unknowns” of the cinematic apparatus, or the unnaturalness of meaning making. These “unknowns” are an entry point to a deeper conception of politics, which Althusser developed in his writings on Machiavelli. These writings, though not on the reading list of Gidal, surprisingly argue for “an experimental method” in the political space which is “empty, though it is always occupied”.71 I argue that this vacuous space is where the Gidal problematic could be grasped in its full complexity. Althusser can provide us with insight into this. This political space (or conjuncture) of Althusser, filled with a subjective political practice is “a pure aleatory possibilityimpossibility”; there is no guarantee it will hold. It requires “to leap into the void”, or as he specifies, into “a theoretical void”.72 This subjectivity, which Machiavelli called ‘virtue’, if in the right moment is merged, or encountered, with ‘fortuna’ (the conjuncture), then some revolution, or transformation, might occur. It is as if, in the Parmenidean world, the exact atoms would match. Althusser’s project, especially in his later writings, was to detect instances where this “encounter” happened and had “duration” and permanency.73 He categorically refused to mix virtue with bourgeois morals, which are always reactionary, and “always look backwards”. Another important lesson from Althusser is that the theoretical and political work is always done in solitude, which correlates to the “vacuum of the conjuncture”.74 Althusser’s writings on Machiavelli, and on aleatory materialism, were mostly published posthumously, only known to few of his close collaborators. Despite this obscurity, François Matheron argues that void is central to Althusser’s philosophy, and a concept that constantly returns.75 Ideology is horrified by void, and the epistemological void gives vertigo to materialist 66. Gidal, Materialist Film, p. 130. 67. Colin McCabe, Theoretical Essays: Film, Linguistics, Literature, Manchester University Press, 1985, pp. 15-16. As Antony Easthope argued in his brief but condensed study of Screen trajectory, the journal capitulated not to the confusing, or legibly complex theoretical systems, but this shift, before the question of pleasure, was the reduction of Althusser into the theory of ideological interpellation and subjectivation. Antony Easthope, ‘The Trajectory of Screen 1971-1979’, The Politics of Theory, edited by Francis Barker, University of Essex, 1983. 68. Gidal, ‘Theory and Definition’, p. 2. 48 contrary, to the disavowal of these complex heuristic systems. It went towards the direction of Foucauldian dispositif (Easthope argues it was unconsciously Foucauldian already before 1979), desire, pleasure, and other nonheuristic directions, abandoning the rigour of theoretical concepts. One crucial consequence in Sezgin Boynik 49 69. Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, p. 266. 70. Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, p. 89. 71. Louis Althusser, Macchiavelli and Us, Verso, London, 2010, p. 33, 20. 72. Althusser, Macchiavelli and Us, p. 26, 42. 73. Ibid., p. 43. The Gidal Problematic philosophy. Most importantly, the “void-form” is characterised by “pertinence”, with the question of power and subjectivity that is both aleatory and operates in “negativity”, i.e. rejects every ultimate ontological guarantee. In other words, every obviousness, recognition, and familiarity is outright rejected. Crucial to this thesis is that the void is measured through its permanency. Conceptually, this “profoundly consistent thought”, was what drove Althusser to Lenin who discovered this pertinence/ strength in philosophy, “the path of paths that leads nowhere”.76 POWER OF NEGATIVITY When in 1983, in an interview with Jonathan Rosenbaum, Gidal claimed that “the structure of experimental film had its own power”, he meant the power of negativity and the solitude residing in a vacuum. It is through “constancy” this power is constituted, unlike the “liberal pluralistic thing” of the reconciliatory forms of the Other Cinema.77 What counts here is the way in which “powerful” aspects of experimental films were defined; not through the solidity of their institutions but via the aleatoriness of its forms: “forceful, strong, complex, problematical, and contradictory”.78 From here we can draw a line between the strong materialist elements of the avant-garde films and its fragile domain of subjectivity. Echoing Althusser’s thesis on the innercontradiction of the ideology – the strong/weak dialectics – the obscure subjectivity which experimental avant-garde films imply were also noticed by Screen’s theoreticians.79 Structural74. Ibid., p. 50, 64. Cinema: A History, Part II, 197875. François Matheron, ‘The 1985’, Screen, 27: 2, MarchRecurrence of the Void in Louis April, 1986. Althusser’, Rethinking Marxism: 78. Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘Organizing A Journal of Economics, Culture, the Avant-Garde: A Conversation and Society, 10: 3, 1998, p. 22-23. with Peter Gidal’, Film: The 76. Matheron, ‘The Recurrence of the Front Line 1983, Arden Press, Void’, p. 30. Althusser used Denver, 1983, p. 229. In the this quote in his text on Spinoza. interview, Gidal is explicit about 77. Founded in 1970, The Other what concretely he means by this Cinema was an independent “power, which is against other distribution organisation based things” (p. 228). It is the power in London. They distributed films by of Co-op filmmakers who don’t Godard, Straub/Huillet, Werner make a living in commerce, whose Herzog, Pedro Almodóvar, among “practice is as experimental others. A first hand account of filmmakers all the time” (p. 223). its history can be found in Sylvia 79. Perhaps the only author who Harvey, ‘The Other Cinema: has to some extent successfully A History, Part I, 1970-1977’, opposed this omission was Screen, 26: 6, NovemberStephen Heath, whose theory December, 1986; ‘The Other benefited both from Althusserian 50 Sezgin Boynik Materialist film practice – as the “ultra-left” of experimental filmmaking – complicated this subjectivity further still. INTENSE SUBJECT Rather than noticing the existence of such complex subjectivities, in recent academic writings, Gidal’s work is often interpreted as representing a total disavowal of subjectivity. Patti Gaal-Holmes claims that “Gidal was entirely opposed to the idea of subjectivity”, and the anti-representational stance of his films “posed problems for women filmmakers”.80 Her project was to resuscitate parallely existing personal and poetic cinemas, which she claims were oppressed by “dominant socialist and Marxist ideologies”.81 Less revisionist accounts of the same position were given by the younger generation of Structural-Materialist filmmakers, some of them students of Gidal. Michael Mazière claimed that Gidal’s work “suppressed subjectivity and identification”.82 Sarah Pucill described the early Structural-Materialist films as being solely in the pursuit of “purity”, Ruth Novaczek considered them “dull and boring”, but it goes without saying not every woman filmmaker involved in the Co-op had the same experience.83 Nina Danino, another filmmaker associated with Structural-Materialism, insisted on the “distinction between Gidal’s position and the mechanistic production techniques associated with formal structural film”; 84 claiming in another recent discussion on the feminist persepctive of the London Filmmaker’s Co-op’s work, that concepts and avant-garde film practices. As a result he introduced concepts resisting a mechanistic application of Althusserian ideological analysis. ‘Narrative Space’, his most famous article, depicts the construction of the fundamental cinematic-reality in film, which is space, by referring to structural filmmakers like Michael Snow and Hollis Frampton. He applied this theoretical orientation in ‘On Suture’, arguing against approaches that totalise the capacities of the apparatus, and, “simple equation with ideology”. Instead of interpellation, Heath suggests an alternative concept of “intrication”, a more dialectical and dynamic account of suturing, 51 80. 81. 82. 83. corresponding to the formal excesses of avant-garde films (Questions of Cinema, p. 107). Patti Gaal-Holmes, A History of 1970s Experimental Film: Britain’s Decade of Diversity, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, p.164, p. 156. Gaal-Holmes, A History of 1970s Experimental Film, p. 64. ‘Roundtable discussion: London Film-makers’ Co-op – the second generation’, Moving Image Review & Art Journal, 3: 2, 2014, p. 242. Danino, N., Matthee, J., Novaczek, R., Pucill, S. and Syed, A., ‘Roundtable discussion: The women of the London Film-maker’s Co-op’, The Moving Image Review & Art Journal, 4: 1-2, 2015. The Gidal Problematic her generation have “learned from structural film and were changing it”.85 Further, Alia Syed, states that “structural films made [her] think of a different way”, in that “the dark became retreat which enabled stuff to emerge”, as she says, “something within myself”.86 In the eighties, Gidal’s work gave a pretext for a theory “not bogged down in psychological debates”, as Nicky Hamlyn writes, adding that, in the end, Gidal’s “negative aesthetic is given a positive turn”.87 Nina Danino gave the best definition of this elusive and strained dialectics as intense subject which refers to “the expression of a difficult subjectivity produced or constructed by film as object and as experience. This work seems to be created out of a certain state of marginalisation and solitude as ‘production process’ away from both gallery and big cinema. It is imaginary and drive is obsessional and often circulates around loss and gaps of expression or emotional ‘fullness’ yet can also be silent, quiet or restrained”.88 These are but some of the accounts that suggest the existence of a different and demanding subjectivity residing in Gidal’s project; a painstakingly political (“political pain”), laborious, non-conformist, uneasy subjectivity. Hamlyn described these as forms “neither subjective nor objective”.89 As a conclusion I can say that it is a gross misjudgement to claim that Gidal’s films have opposed subjectivity and his work on “antirepresentation posed problems for women filmmakers”. To give a theoretical context to my refutation of what I consider a simpli84. ‘Roundtable discussion: London Videography: Video Media as Art Film-makers’ Co-op’, p. 243. and Culture, Macmillan, London, 85. ‘Roundtable discussion: The 1993, p. 86-87. women of the London Film88. Nina Danino, ‘Intense Subject’, maker’s Co-op’, p. 168. Undercut Reader, p. 8. 86. ‘Roundtable discussion: The 89. Hamlyn, ‘From Structuralism to women of the London FilmImagism’, p. 234. maker’s Co-op’, p. 168-169. 90. This break is very interesting, and 87. Nicky Hamlyn, ‘From Structuralism its reasons can not be reduced to Imagism: Peter Gidal and His only to feminist struggles. The Influence in the 1980s’, Undercut ongoing discussions on Co-op’s Reader: Critical Writings on politics of distribution were also Artists’ Film and Video, edited determining this factionalism. The by N. Danino and M. Mazière, policy of Co-op was to erase Wallflower Press, London, 2003, the boundaries between production p. 235, 233. Sean Cubitt and distribution. This gave a cohesiveness to their organiargued for a more open declaration of this openness, when asked sational structure, which was an “effective intervention in for Gidal’s “meaninglessness independent film culture and in [to be] conceived positively” for the institutions of fine art”, as the purpose of a “possible Rod Stoneman has remarked. future subjectivity”. Sean Cubitt, 52 Sezgin Boynik fication, I will look to Gidal’s 1984 essay, named quite appropriately ‘Against Sexual Representation in Film’. Before that, some history. The demise of Structural-Materialist films began in the second half of the seventies, the year when ‘The Author as Producer of Nothing’, was written. In 1978, Film as Film, a retrospective exhibition at Hayward Gallery on the history of avantgarde filmmaking including Structural-Materialist films, was boycotted by a group of women filmmakers, and many of them withdrew from the project to re-group as Circles, dedicated to distribution of films made by women artists. Among the artists who withdrew from the exhibition was Peter Gidal.90 Gidal was also influential in setting the rule of half/half women ratio in the organisational structures of the London Co-op. One could argue that this was also a consequence of his Althusserianism, patently opposing any ideological spontaneities reproducing inequalities and disadvantages for women practitioners. There is some truth in Michael O’Pray’s statement that Gidal “took radical feminist logic to its ultimate conclusion”.91 Next to Althusser, another important influence on Gidal’s theoretical writings was Christine Delphy; a radical feminist whose materialist theory urged for a total break from binary gender categorisation, from the solid ideological point that “one must be either a man or a woman in order to be”, as Lisa Cartwright, a feminist filmmaker, summarised.92 Delphy helped to introduce a political and combatant feminism that struggled against ‘cultural For various reasons, some of the dependent upon grant aid for its filmmakers involved in Co-op continued existence in any form”. started to signal the “inherent These changes were completely weakness in non-promotion”, against what Gidal referred to suggesting the need for a more as “socialist principles” of the exhibition planning and guidelines London Filmmakers Co-op. “They for promotion (Rod Stoneman, run counter to the foundational ‘Film Related Practice and the philosophy of the LFMC, which Avant-Garde’, Screen, 20: 3.4, has predicated on destroying the Winter 1979, p. 54-55). This was segmentation within film industry a huge change in the Co-op, but (maker/critic/impresario) with cannot be understood in isolation fierce DIY activity, co-operative from the wider cultural policy of endeavour and the development financing and subsidising the of an integrated practice” (Julia experimental films, starting in 1975 Knight and Peter Thomas, Reaching Audiences: Distribution with BFI and Art Council grants. and Promotion of Alternative In their landmark book on Moving Image, Intellect, London, cultural policy of experimental 2011, p. 56). film in the UK, Julia Knight and Peter Thomas write that “just five 91. Michael O’Pray, ‘Act at a Distance’, Monthly Film Bulletin, years after the landmark 1975 BFI March 1986, p. 64. Grant, the Co-op had become 53 The Gidal Problematic feminism’, which also meant struggle against the normative representation of women’s emancipation, whether it was normative in its cultural norms or in its reproduction of gender codes. The latter position was a crucial influence for experimental feminist filmmakers, as can be read from Cartwright’s interview with Delphy, but also in many references Gidal makes to Delphy’s works. Delphy has often pointed at the difficulties posed by representing identities beyond the dual codes of man and woman. Her project was to engage with feminism despite the discouraging linguistic and cultural background, as she suggests, it was almost impossible to think outside of existing gender binaries.93 Or as she claimed in an Undercut interview in the same year: “You cannot name an unsexed person so you cannot think of that person, you cannot think about it; or you could think about it as a problem, the problem being to name it”.94 Concepts in the eighties were not yet ripe for the new reconfiguration of gender identities beyond given cultural binaries, which today enjoy a better democratic representation, increasingly even in language. For us it is important to note what uses experimental filmmakers, including Gidal, made of this dilemma. One lesson of that encounter, which carries its actuality still today, is that in the seventies, and in the eighties, the filmmakers did not want to simplify and reduce this difficulty and complexity. They were sensitive not to wash off the differences from mainstream representation when engaging with these questions. Delphy had a political agenda in drawing these lines of demarcation, as she was politically concerned with opposing and differentiating her feminism from the liberal values of cultural feminists “associating femaleness with traditional values”.95 This “fact of division” is not only about content, she insisted, but also it implied the “formal” division, which is what mattered most to the filmmakers who engaged with her thought. Gidal, following this knowledge of a non-binary gender position, argued for a position requiring constant questioning, something he described as “impossibility at each moment”.96 This radical aspect of intense subjectivity aimed at the “representation of the male and the female as the ideological mode of reproducing dominant relations”.97 In order to succeed in this, the film imagery (form, visuality) had to emancipate from the “rationale” of man/woman essentialism. For example, as Gidal argued, the image of “a pregnant women is locked into a signification system so ideologically overdetermined that no other kind of operation affecting the editing, zooming, focusing, camerawork, subject-position, in the audience, off-screen space, or sound, can ‘subvert’ it”.98 Present in the image of a pregnant woman is such a strong ideological stamp of reproduction, that it can not be in any way utilised in experimental films opposing these dominant representations. This is another reason Gidal sought to oppose representation altogether. Successors of this materialist feminism in art were the practitioners of materialist filmmaking of “constant un-knowing”; one could argue this refusal to include a sort of decontamination from narrative and representation – this is the thread uniting the entirety of Gidal’s work. Despite its similarity to contemporary practices, this form (method) is different from today’s ‘safe space’ positions, which often, in order to create a space free from essentialist definitions, i.e. a space free from any form of oppression, has to constantly renegotiate its commonalities, and introduce new rules and limitations in order to operate. To this shield of rational formalism of conciliatory anti-representation, Gidal opposed with the memorable slogan: “A materialist isn’t a rationalist isn’t ‘against’ the unconsciousness (which by the way is a process)”.99 In a formal artistic and theoretical sense, one possible consequence of a rational and reconciliatory safe space approach, is an unwillingness to challenge the artistic and cultural forms, and models, with which they are in ideological conflict; as a result we might see a proliferation of comfortable non-binariness operating on a par with the mainstream and 92. Lisa Cartwright, ‘On Representation and Sexual Division: An Interview with Christine Delphy’, Undercut Reader, p. 47. 93. “This is all reflected in language: People cannot refer to themselves individually as ‘it’; they must say ‘he’ or ‘she’. […] A generic identity of human beings just does not exist. So how can individuals find it? They can’t. It’s not their fault if when they grow up to be adults or Delphy’, Undercut Reader, p. 49. 95. ‘An Interview with Christine Delphy’, Undercut Reader, p. 54. Delphy continues this project, now struggling against the liberal feminists’ contribution to the criminalisation of Islam in the process of ban of the Muslim veil in France. Christine Delphy, Separate and Dominate: Feminism and Racism After the War on Terror, translated by David Broder, Verso, London, 2015. 54 feminists or whatever they don’t find it – it doesn’t exist in this culture so it can’t be found. […] When one questions that, one questions everyone’s identity. People cannot afford to be left without an identity.” Laura Cottingham, ‘International Interview: Christine Delphy – French Feminist’, Off Our Backs, 14: 3, March 1984, p. 25. 94. ‘An Interview with Christine Sezgin Boynik 55 96. Peter Gidal, ‘Against Sexual Representation in Film’, Screen 25: 6, November-December 1984, p. 27. 97. Gidal, ‘Against Sexual Representation in Film’, p. 28. 98. Gidal, Materialist Film, p. 47. 99. Gidal, ‘The Anti-Narrative’, p. 78. This is why it is important to fight against the objectivity of images and the rationality of our relation to them. The Gidal Problematic dominant (ideological) forms. In other words, one might imagine to oppose the reproduction of forms of representation without challenging the implications of being engaged with the forms that ‘naturally’ reproduce the existing norms of essentialism, using existing representations that are reproduced through the “perceptual iconography of the known” and the “familial”.100 A position that “does not militate against”, a position of conformist experimentation, “with one eye in commerce […] and an avoidance of avant-garde difficulties”.101 MANICHEAN DELIRIUM Difficulties are everywhere, especially concerning the question of identity. “Film works that do not arrest, return and hold the viewer” were the aim;102 moving beyond Brecht with a total refusal to engage with the forms of identity. Confronting “imperialisms” of identity with “socialisms” of anonymity, and seeking the ways to theoretically elaborate the concept of non-identity, was central to Gidal’s practice.103 It was exactly in the eighties, when in theory, art, and culture the opposite was taking place – questions surrounding identity were becoming a central problem in academia. This identityturn was supported by popular protest, uprisings, riots, and mass political movements, a part of whose agenda could be interpreted as the emancipation from anonymity. There were numerous people in London, and elsewhere in the UK, who were urgently, and fiercely, declaring their identity. They wanted to be visible and to be represented. Many artists and theoreti cians supported these demands. Stuart Hall in 1980 criticised the unwillingness of Screen to include the issue of the “politics of identity” in their pages, which he considered to be a symptom of the failure of leftist discourse in face of Thatcherism.104 Hall concluded his essay with the optimistic prospect that what he considered the boycott of identity politics by the left would disappear in the future. This is exactly what happened; but arguably not in the direction Hall would expect. In their introduction to the Screen journal’s 1988 “last special issue on race”,105 the editors Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer reiterated this argument but now with a more critical vehemence: “during its ‘centred’ role in the discursive formation of film theory, during the 1970s, Screen participated in a phase of British leftist culture that inadvertently marginalised race and ethnicity as a consequence of the centrifugal tendency of its ‘high theory’”.106 Referring to the ongoing crisis in Western European culture and institutions, without relating to any specific political conjuncture, the authors were calling for an alternative representation, which would give voice to diverse ethnicities and redefine the function of film with a more general terms of “a practice of selection, combination, and articulation”.107 In form and in content, this posed an opposition to the abstraction and non-objectivity of Structural-Materialist films. Julien and Mercer argued that the Screen theory and avant-garde had, with their binary based ideology and ‘Manichean delirium’, as a result, undervalued and suppressed Black subjectivities in British film.108 I would argue rather, that Gidal, and the avant-garde filmmakers associated with Structural-Materialist practices should not be accused of binariness and ‘Manichean delirium’; as, on the contrary, most of the filmmakers involved in these kinds of films were categorically against any forms of mechanistic and reductionist representation of gender, sexuality, race and nationality. This schism became apparent in the ‘Cultural Identities’ event organised by Undercut journal in 1986. Mercer in his contribution to the discussion following the screenings, claimed that in the eighties “the Leninist desire for ‘correctness’ seems somehow archaic, or at least out-moded as a political ideal”. With the rising emphasis on “politics of pleasure”, both in filmmaking and theory, the direction has changed, now giving an opportunity to “re-evaluate the inheritance of the theoretical frameworks that characterised the ‘ascetic aesthetic’ of independent practices in the 1970s”.109 Defending the engagement with “mainstream narrative conventions” against “theoretical constraint of the European avant-garde” (as in films like Lis Rhodes’ Light Reading), Mercer defends carnival, desire, and pleasure.110 In the next session appropriately titled ‘Aesthetics and politics: working on two fronts’ Gidal remarked that to “endlessly denounce questions of form as irrelevant at best and elitist at 100. Gidal, ‘Against Sexual Representation in Film’, p. 26. 101. Gidal, ‘Against Sexual Representation in Film’, p. 27. 102. Ibid., p. 29. 103. Gidal, Materialist Film, p. 12. 104. Stuart Hall, ‘Recent April, 1983; ‘Other Cinemas, 107. Julien and Mercer, ‘De Margin and Other Criticisms’, Screen 26: 3-4, De Centre’, p. 4. May-August 1985. 108. Ibid., p. 7. 106. Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer, 109. Kobena Mercer, ‘Introduction to ‘De Margin and De Centre’, Sexual Identities: Questions of Screen 29:4, Autumn, 1988, p. 7. Difference’, in Undercut Reader, p. 143. 56 Developments in Theories of Language and Ideology: a critical note’, Culture, Media, Language, edited by S. Hall, et al., 1980. 105. Previous special issues included, ‘Racism, Colonialism, and the Cinema’, Screen 24:2, March- Sezgin Boynik 57 The Gidal Problematic worst, is to play straight into the hands of dominant representation, i.e. dominant forms”.111 This critique is still valid, today perhaps even more so. Gidal does not stop here; he also challenges Mercer and Julien’s position by claiming that pleasure is the field where narrative constitutes itself through forms of “‘un-problematic voyeurism”, that is, the field of dominant representation and narrative.112 Gidal is also recorded as saying, impatiently, that “all [I] can add to this is that irony does not change a damn thing and if I hear the word desire one more time I’m going to throw up”.113 Responding to remarks from the audience, Gidal reiterated his definition of film as based on arbitrariness, and meaninglessness. It is these last two points which sparked heavy discussion. Someone from the audience commented that they experienced Gidal’s films as “frustrating [and] without any political function, meaningless film[s]”.114 Criticism Gidal did not disagree with. To this, another person from the audience reacted saying that “it is not entirely arbitrary that there are [still] discriminatory laws in this country”,115 alluding to the limits of ‘ultra-left’ formalism when facing the political and ideological violence of the state structures. This, however, was not a concern of Gidal, who famously claimed that “political issues can not be solved filmically”. The answer to this deadlock was to be found somewhere else, a space still lacking its vocabulary for political representation. NO PLACE FOR THE LOOK From the eighties onwards, Structural-Materialist film was challenged on many other fronts. Rod Stoneman, writing about his experiences of working as a commissioner for Channel 4 remembers that the “ultra-rationalism of structural theory” was not able to account for nor speak to themes “of diversity, contingent orientation, desires, and search for the other”.116 Something else was needed for the changing atmosphere of the eighties. The left, with their “Manichean understanding of the world” were characterised as “inadequate in grasping the complexities of this reality”,117 though newly emerging theories from the “dissident cultural intelligentsia” in independent film, were increasingly provided an entry point into the world of broadcasting in the Thatcher years. Stoneman himself optimistically noted that this move carried with it, “the values of late sixties radicalism”.118 There are few experimental filmmakers from the time who haven’t commented on the catastrophic effects of Thatcherism; from Lis Rhodes saying “the mirror of the 1980s reflects free market economics, deregulation and privatisation”, to Anna Thew remembering more specifically the years of “the miners’ strikes, ‘Our Hands Greenham’, the Falklands War, cancer, HIV/AIDS, censorship, Mary Whitehouse, anti-squatting laws, art cuts, […] deaths”.119 It was in these years (1981-1990) when a slim magazine Undercut was published by the London Filmmaker’s Co-op, articulating a “theory of film as art which was not reductive to either some vague notion of context (ideological), or subjectspectator position or semiotic-intertextuality”,120 in other words a film practice opposing mainstream alternative cinema and artmarket commerce. In the eighties when almost every filmmaker involved with the Co-op was – under the marketising pressures of Thatcherism, and other conditions and concerns – turning towards more narrative forms, and socialist theory was reduced to be a leading cultural force in “civil society, popular culture and urban life”.121 Whilst Gidal, in his solitude of experimental film virtue, was writing that narrative and popular forms “lead to what Lenin called objective opportunism”.122 Apart from editors of that magazine at the LFMC, for whom Gidal was a “model”,123 who else in the eighties was communicating through ultra-left Structural-Materialism? Already in 1978 these questions had grown tired, when Sylvia Harvey in her report on the problems of the independent cinema in the UK, concluded that “the question of audience” 110. Ibid. In the discussion following Mercer’s paper, both Gayatri Spivak and Jacqueline Rose opposed this criticism as “reductionist”. 111. Peter Gidal, ‘In Representation or Out? Some Condensed Notes on Aesthetics and Politics’, Undercut Reader, p. 156. 112. Gidal, ‘In Representation or Out?’, p. 157. University of Luton Press, 1996, p. 287. 117. Rod Stoneman, ‘Sins of Commission’, Screen, 33: 2, Summer 1992, p. 129. 118. Stoneman, ‘Sins of Commission’, p. 133. 119. ‘Lis Rhodes in conversation with Jenny Lund: London, 16 April, 2015’, Moving Image Review & Art Journal, 4:1-2, December 58 113. Ibid. 114. ‘Questions/responses from audience: Aesthetics and Politics’, Undercut Reader, p. 160. 115. Ibid., 159. 116. Rod Stoneman, ‘Incursions and Inclusions: The Avant-Garde on Channel Four, 1983-1993’, The British Avant-Garde Film, 19261995: An Anthology of Writings, edited by Michael O’Pray, Sezgin Boynik 59 2015, p. 185. William Fowler, James Mackay, Anna Thew, ‘Even Malcolm Became a Feminist’, Salt., No. 7, 2015, unpaginated. 120. Michael O’Pray, ‘Undercut and Theory’, Undercut Reader, p. 15. 121. Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left, Verso, London, 1988, p. 9. 122. Gidal, Materialist Film, p. 130. The Gidal Problematic was central to this formation and pointed out that StructuralMaterialism was a cul-de-sac in this regard. She argued that structuralist engagement with a constant critique of illusionism had remained “caught up in a permanent meditation upon the nature of illusion which is the much same thing as a permanent meditation upon the nature of art”.124 Harvey proposed instead to discuss the problematic under the larger umbrella of ‘independent cinema’ which would detach from the abstraction of structuralism and learn from the popular forms of political theatre, which is to say, to simplify the forms of experimental filmmaking. This was happening anyway, but the new course of independent cinema of the eighties – reshaped by the leadership of Channel 4 by Stoneman – was going toward the opposite direction, towards the right, of what Harvey hoped might happen. Foreseeing this commercialisation and populistic route, radical experimental filmmakers influenced by the work done at the London Co-op were defending art as a possibility to not compromise. For many of them, to defend film as art, and the endless meditation on it, was not a refuge from political context; it was a shelter from the ideological context of ‘gallery’ art practice and its institutions. To orient in this direction of abstraction, one needed a more specific, concrete and engaged definition of this art. In this regard, Gidal’s intervention, aiming to clarify this art, is indispensable. Recently, Gidal remarked that his “seemingly abstract films were very precise”;125 as we have seen, the discussions surrounding this precision were rather obscure. That was in fact the intention. The abstract art of this sort did not communicate with the art world proper, which is the art of galleries, biennials, museums, and official institutions with rules not dissimilar to the existing norms of culture as it relates with capital. There is a well known debate between Gidal and Annette Michelson, then the editor of Artforum, whom he criticised for trying to place avantgarde (American) film at the centre of the (national) culture, as he saw it.126 Gidal and other Structural-Materialist filmmakers did not have that aspiration; they were doing something more radical and underground. With their own channels of distribution, DIY-based production, and cinemas and workshops operating as a social space, they were against mainstream culture. It is, for me at least, not a surprise that so many filmmakers involved in Co-op were a part of the squat movement, punk underground, Anti-Nuclear campaigns, and radical gay and lesbian groups; the form of Structural-Materialism was permanently against, as Gidal wrote, always “militating against”. This is the reason, I think, why until more recently these films have not been a part of the contemporary art world, or contemporary art history.127 There is an interesting correspondence, between Gidal and Charles Harrison, then the editor of Studio International, which was published in the magazine in 1971. The starting point was Harrison’s text ‘A very abstract context’, a very interesting piece that argued against the inadequacy of then prevailing theories for engaging with the new articulations of conceptual and minimal art forms. Harrison memorably claimed that “illusionism is remnant of a art’s now redundant narrative function”, with this championing Art & Language and Joseph Kosuth’s detachment from the experience as such and arguing for “the decontamination of the mind”, in other words, for the analytical capacity against experiential vagueness.128 Gidal, in a short note published in the magazine announced his desperation at the proposed dichotomy between “thought and sensation”, which he found conservative.129 He accused Harrison of “bullshitting”, by which he meant to say that his criticism was just a redressing of opinions, far from what was happening underground at the Co-op in the field of real artistic abstraction. Harrison, in the same issue of the magazine replied to this, accusing Gidal of “hysterical indeterminacy”, which he, in the March issue announced both characteristics “indeterminacy” and “hysteria” fitting to his understanding of art, unlike the art of “political crap”, of the confident wiseman who insisted on separation of body and mind.130 This is how debates on abstraction were waged in the seventies. In the issue between these correspondences, Gidal 123. O’Pray, ‘Undercut and Theory’, p. 13. 124. Sylvia Harvey, Independent Cinema?, West Midlands Arts, 1978, p. 12, p. 18. 125. ‘Flashbacks: Peter Gidal’, Filmwaves, No. 7, Spring, 1999, p. 20. 126. Gidal refers to Michelson’s for example, Barry Schwabsky’s 129. Peter Gidal, ‘Correspondence’, ‘Art, Film, Video: Separation or Studio International, No. 929, Synthesis’ and Michael Mazière’s January 1971, p. 5. ‘The Solitude of the System’, 130. Peter Gidal, ‘Correspondence’, Undercut Reader. Studio International, No. 931, 128. Charles Harrison, ‘A Very Abstract March 1971, p. 95. One can Context’, in Studio International, speculate about this distinct No. 927, November 1970, p. 195, approaches abstraction and p. 196. anti-narrative as being linked 60 remark “American [filmmakers] are making their way gradually towards the centre of our own culture”, cited in Materialist Film, p. 162, in Artforum, May, 1975. 127. There are a couple of insightful texts dealing with contemporary artists’ and curators’ blind spots surrounding this history, Sezgin Boynik 61 The Gidal Problematic published another short note in Studio International, simply titled ‘Film-makers’ Cooperative’, where he announced the call for filmmakers to submit their works to a Co-operative, which had 250 films in distribution, and which paid the filmmaker 60% (but hoped to raise it to 75%) and kept 40% for running cost in the space with available workshop and screenings.131 This was the culture, which contemporary art, with its umbilical cord attached to the private market and capitalist consumerism, was lacking. As filmmaker Annabel Nicolson is reported saying, “the structure of [a] Co-op is awkward for history to grasp”,132 one reason for this being the radical egalitarian form of its organisation, which would hardly fit into other contemporary art structures then engaging with forms of abstraction. When later in 1974, Malcolm Le Grice reviewed Room Film 1973 in Studio International as a “work of art […] enlarging the questions related to the abstraction”,133 the social attitude of confrontational abstraction was still fresh. We have mentioned Gidal’s project as being one against “free” and “democratic” possibilities,134 corresponding to his indignation towards vague concepts. With years this position has evolved into a world-view against the metaphor, that is against “imperialist conglomeration of meaning”.135 In the period of postmodernism, almost all the intelligentsia of the West united in the offensive against big meanings, and grand narratives, including the grand narratives of the Marxist left. Opening the door to continuous compromise and perpetual improvisation, which Peter Osborne wittily defined as “radicalism without limit”,136 this ideology in the eighties was also a platform for reactionary and conservative art forms. Gidal did not join in with this cohort, but his work was made to fit into this new discourse. As Stephen Heath has remarked, “there is for Gidal a radical impossibility: the history of cinema”,137 a claim that we think is related to his radical artistic gestures. A claim that needs one more reading. Among the theoreticians in the eighties engaged in the revisionism of Gidal’s work was David Rodowick who linked this claim on “radical impossibility” with politics, precisely with the failure of politics, by suggesting that the impossibility of history implies the impossibility of “positive transformation of social practices”.138 In turn interpreting this nihilism, and negativity, as a potential for the “resistance to the reproduction of ideology by diminishing any traces of the signified in aesthetic work”.139 In other words, Rodowick understands that meaninglessness is the only meaningful operation Gidal’s emptiness and nothingness can offer. Rodowick’s interpretation of Gidal is suited to his analysis of the crisis of political modernism, which he argued happened due to the crisis in politics; i.e. politics of mono-linearity and directness. Rodowick was for a politics based on “undecidability” and multivalency, and armoured with that idea, he was against the Marxist appropriation of Derrida, and and the appropriation of Althusser by theoreticians of cinema. Thus, the negativity of Gidal was favourably situated as an alternative to the crisis of the leftist, modernist political project. It is true that Gidal has always seen politics as “a negative kind of displacement”,140 and notably wrote that “when the significance shines through (located in ‘history’ or not) we are back in the Radek/Lukács camp”.141 The significance of Radek shines through as the significance of mediocracy, compromise, conservatism, the right-wing, and Stalinism. This in no way symbolised the left or socialist politics. The real target was the liberal metaphors of bourgeois-conservative culture, which always belong to the right. As Gidal wrote in Against Metaphor, “Civil Libertarians blather on about ‘the marketplace of ideas’, a capitalist metaphor sustaining freedom for oppression, not from”.142 What lessons should we draw from this experience, and work? Despite his refusal of unboundness and liberal openness, the Structural-Materialist films of Gidal, as Stephen Heath has noticed, “have no place for the look”143; no master view, ceaselessly displaced, and decentered but nevertheless with a focused gaze. This “conscious desire to clarify” is the essence to distinct attitudes, which in Gidal manifested in his solidarity with feminist and subcultural movements, completely alien domains for Harrison. 131. Peter Gidal, ‘Film-makers Cooperative’, Studio International, No. 930, February 1971, p. 45. 132. Quoted in Rod Stoneman, ‘Film Related Practice and the Avant- Democracy and the Politics of Identity’, Socialism and the Limits of Liberalism, edited by P. Osborne, Verso, 1991. 137. Stephen Heath, ‘Afterword’, Screen, 20: 2, 1979, p. 94. 138. David Rodowick, The Crisis of Political Modernism, Illinois University Press, 1985, p. 140. 139. Rodowick, The Crisis of Political 62 Garde’, Screen, 20: 3.4, Winter 1979, p. 54. 133. Malcolm Le Grice, ‘Vision’, Studio International, No 962, January 1974, p. 36. 134. Gidal, Materialist Film, p. xiv. 135. Peter Gidal, Against Metaphor, London, 1988, p. 19. 136. Peter Osborne, ‘Radicalism Without Limit? Discourse, Sezgin Boynik 63 Modernism, p. 41. 140. Lehman, ‘Politics, History and Avant-Garde: An Interview with Peter Gidal’, p. 73. 141. Peter Gidal, ‘Correspondence’, Screen, 17: 2, Summer 1976, p. 131. 142. Gidal, Against Metaphor, p. 49. Regrettably, this paragraph is omitted from the revised version The Gidal Problematic of Gidal’s project.144 As Le Grice noted, the anti-narrative films did not guarantee anything, including even even a resistance to resistance to identification; the films were rather a “possibility of resistance to identification”, which required an active “film act”. A conclusion I completely agree with from Le Grice, is that Gidal’s “film work” led towards a “public discourse”;145 the project of producing the conditions for “active viewing”146 and operated in a state of clarity for the audience. “If Gidal did not exist, we might have had to invent him”,147 wrote Michael O’Pray alluding more to the strength of his whole practice and theory, that is, his problematic, rather than the personality of Peter Gidal. One aspect of this is clarity, precision, focus, and integrity; virtues all leftists working with experimental forms are interested in. The reason we publish this book is to give our version of Gidal, which is not obscured by mystified opaqueness, art-world ambiguities, and theoretical mediocrity. published in Flare Out: Aesthetics edited by Sue Clayton and Laura 1966-2016, but is quoted by Mulvey, I. B. Tauris, 2017, p. 161. Lis Rhodes in her interview with 145. Le Grice, ‘Thoughts on Gidal’s Jenny Lund. Films and Theory’, p. 75. 143. Stephen Heath, ‘Repetition 146. Gidal, ‘Technology and Ideology’, Time: Notes Around Structuralp. 163. Malcolm Le Grice’s theory. Materialist Film’, Questions 147. Michael O’Pray, ‘Act at a Distance’, of Cinema, Macmillan Press, Monthly Film Bulletin, March 1986, London, 1981, p. 71. p. 64. This statement echoes Osip 144. Peter Gidal, ‘British Avant-Garde Brik’s formalist-materialist justifiFilm’, Millennium Film Journal, cation for the arbitrariness of art No. 13, Fall-Winter, 1983-84. As creativity: “If Pushkin had never Steven McIntyre wrote, in today’s existed ‘Eugene Onegin’ would corporate logic of contemporary still have been written”. Osip Brik, ‘The So-called ‘Formal Method’ art, this aspiration for clarity “strikes [1923]’, Art in Theory 1900-1990: as still as relevant as ever”. Steven An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Mcintyre, ‘A whole new attitude: edited by Charles Harrison and The London Film-makers’ Co-op Paul Wood, Blackwell, 1992, in the decade of Structural/ p. 323. Materialism’, Other Cinemas, 64 Sezgin Boynik