Category: 16mm Film

My final year ‘project’ as a film student at Regent Street Polytechnic (now the University of Westminster), based on sections of Jean Anouilh’s play of the same name. Selected for the annual student screenings at the National Film Theatre, London. The film included a short experimental section employing repetition and over-printing using A, B and C negative rolls. (Whereabouts of the print unknown 2010)

‘A recently rediscovered roll of film shot with my friends Ian and Jackie Breakwell. We had been meeting each Saturday for several years to do things together – this afternoon we made a movie in my local park at the back of BBC Television Centre in Shepherds Bush. A zeitgeist piece, we all shot and performed, wrangling cats and passers-by…. Ian wears the t-shirt of a band he directed at the time, the Somerset Sound Orchestra. Mike Leggett (2007) Super 8mm on Video.

“A recently unearthed series of portraits of three friends, made at the time I was realising that the durational in film, was a subtle but materially substantial visual element. This was a point of emergence in making movies and preceded making contact with the London film-makers.” Mike Leggett (2007) Standard 8mm on Video

“A partially successful attempt to recall within the cinemas the encountering and experiencing of a theatre performance. Occurring in the street [ – an archeological dig – ] with a defined performer to audience relationship, the latter’s role was outside that which it is usually forced to accept; passivity, ignorance, naivite etc. The extent of the encounter both mental and physical was entirely decoded by each individual. The performers were dedicated, variable weather conditions, long hours and sporadic audience, the only apparent reward was complete liberty to decide strategics within the performing role [as archeologists].

To attempt to re-enact a totally three dimensional visual and audio phenomena onto a two dimensional surface was to attempt to personally realise, by transposition, the affirmative of one to that of the other – theatre to film. A sudden encounter is what is stated here, not the details of it. Those have been left to the film.” (1973)

“A film of architectural and indoor and countryside locations in which a 3 metre square linen sheet appears within each location as a focal point.” (1970)

‘A beautiful film exploring relationships between architecture, landscape and people.’ – John Du Cane -Time Out.

‘Shrouding or hiding belong both to death as the mysterious unseen killer, and to the corpse. Sheet has all these feelings. The uncertainty and surprise: Where will it appear next? The sheet appears in odd places, making familiar objects look strange and uncanny. The party goes on with everybody pretending it isn’t there, embarrassed, ashamed of it, it is eventually kicked into a corner. This sums up our present approach to death. As the film proposes: The more we pretend it isn’t there, the more it pursues us. Then, in the final sequence in the valley there seems to be a feeling of resolution. Perhaps that the earth will eventually claim us, but also gives us birth, growth and protection…’ – Extract from a letter to the film-makers from a member of the audience.

The photos were found, together with the two poems, after my great-aunt Tina had died. They formed the basis of the two works, a book made collaboratively with Felipe Ehrenberg and printed at Beau Geste Press (see more about making the book, under Texts). The film made in the same year premiered at the Second International Festival of Avant-Garde Film, National Film Theatre, London in September.

Opening / closing title – “PROJECTIONIST: Re-run film – Do Not Re-Wind”. The film in effect is shown twice, from the head to the tail and from the tail to the head. Whilst the projectionist re-threaded the projector, I played a short composition on the grand piano kept in the main auditorium. “The Film of the Book; two sets of photographs with accompanying words and sounds. The image, the word, the sound presented in a simultaneous backwards/forwards state.”

“Other structurings of particular interest were Mike Leggett’s Erota / Afini, which could be projected forwards and backwards, right way up and upside down, whichever way yielding one combination of rightway up upside down in the imagery and one combination of intelligible sound track (this film also managed to be humorous in a non-distractive fashion and contained a very beautiful and complex superimposing / disuperimposing / zooming in / zooming out with a series of old stills washed in pale greens.” – J. Du Cane, Time Out (1973).

“The Film FRIDAY FRIED mixes sound images in a strictly procedural manner based upon a relationship with the picture track, which itself is structured around a sequence of 16 slide images. Four voices narrate a series of descriptions which refer to the visual detail in the picture whilst also cross-narrating with one another. During the construction of the soundtrack 12 different sources were combined without alteration to balance, tone etc. throughout the film’s 15 minute duration.

Along with the film VISTASOUND made during the same period, FRIDAY FRIED confronts the issue of sound-with-film and arise out of earlier and tentative experiments which examined the relationship between sound images and visual images. Though both films remain close to the still underdeveloped formal work around duration, repetition, visual centering (frame, focus, exposure etc.) the projects extend from problems which emerge in earlier work particularly in the fields of spoken word symbol and sound images; their order and association by implication or direct reference with the image track and within the totality of the sounds heard as mixture. Within the film industry the tradition with sound, the ‘correct’ reproduction and matching of two images, completely dominate the post production effort; complex technical areas make it possible to combine limitless permutations of original sound sources for the purpose of, as with the picture track, creating diegetic space based on transparent means of representation.” (1981)

A film in seven parts for continuous or individual single-screen projection. Total duration 2 hours 15 minutes.

“The film takes Landscape as Object in front of the filmmaker and the Medium; it is not about rural life or the mythology of The Land, neither does it seek to present a personalised impression visual or otherwise of the state of residing in a rural district of the South West of England. The coincidence of flora, fauna and man-made object, processes and activities, with the film frame are in no way paramount to an inspection of the total film process by which an observation of this kind is made possible – specific conditions to do with both Nature and men’s activity with Nature are recorded with the camera but is essentially subject to the observation and reaction of its operator.

What is subsequently examined in the precise activity of assembly of the camera rolls: assembly such as in Window almost entirely dictated by the length of time the camera ran on each occasion; or in Farm which takes into account the pre-determined sub-assembly systems within each of the rolls before arriving at any final order, a decision more determined by a process of inspection and adjustment over a period of time”.

Part 1. “Remains of a cut roll of rushes; images of sheep, splices, grease pencil marks, flash frames, images of marker boards and man talking to camera without sound.”

Part 2. “Assembly from same found material altogether with other found footage and including humans, motor cars and other machines. Governed by a constant 12 frame/half second linear measurement of celluloid & being the durational basis for the selection and re-ordering of material originally destined to be ordered according to the dictates of an explanatory script. At an early stage the inclusion of opaque or partially opaque durations of celluloid, the rapid repetition of selected images, ordering according to binary system, all confound the interpretation of the passage of images”. (1976)

The roll of ‘found footage’ came from the junk bin of a documentary that was never completed. It was first screened uncut during an open screening at the Arts Lab, Drury Lane, London in 1969, when the curator, David Curtis, required that it be given a title; which is was, on the spot. Some years later, after the whole series of films had been completed, a book was discovered with a similar title: The Shearers and the Shorn, by Ernest Martin. The book became a valuable source for a later series of works, Image Con Text.

” …a part of the desire for that pleasure (interrupting) the satisfaction of that desire…”
The shooting of VISTASOUND commenced in 1977 and centred on a holiday postcard upon the surface of which was pressed a recording of a popular 50’s song. This ‘objet-trouve’ was seen as analogous with film, combining a picture record and sound record physically onto a cellulose-acetate base. VISTASOUND then developed by raising questions around the associations that are made between the words in songs and particular places. Locations included, Bristol and Devon in the UK and Norman, Oklahoma in the USA.
Though music can function in a variety of ways in film, within dominant cinema it is generally used to manipulate the audience emotionally, VISTASOUND attempts to oppose such manipulations by opening a critical space, such that the relation between the various sound images, (music, sound ‘effects’, spoken words, etc.), and the visual images, (that of the film-on-the-screen, the photographs, people and places shown in it), are consciously understood in relation to the film’s overall construction.
The debate between the two protagonists (early roles for Alex Jennings and Tim Bendinct), occurs through three differing filmic spaces and employs at one point the word ‘symbiotic’; the reference could be psychoanalytic implying voyeurism and fetishism; or it could be a reference to the observational and recording activities of the military and police; or it could merely be a reference to enthusiasm, to that of the ornithologist or the tourist taking holiday snaps.
“This object describes the space which is the location of that substitution”. (1981)

The large chart used in coordinating the shooting and editing of the three different filmic spaces was featured in a 1986 Arts Council of GB touring exhibition, Charting Time.

A three-screen version was installed for a screening at the Australian Centre for Photography in 2009.

Included as downloads is a student paper written by Chris Toovey (UWA) in response to the film; and an email dialogue about the film.