Re-enactment of Malcolm Le Grice's Horror Film 1: Teaching and Learning Cinema (Louise Curham and Lucas Ihlein), 2014
In mid-2013, Louise Curham and Lucas Ihlein visited the UK to begin research on a possible re-enactment of Malcolm Le Grice’s Horror Film 1 (1971).
Malcolm invited us to work with him on this, after hearing about our other expanded cinema re-enactment projects.
In May 2013, thanks to the hospitality of Steven Ball and David Curtis, we spent several days at the British Artists Film and Video Study Collection (BAFVSC) at Central St Martins art school in London, visiting Malcolm's archives.
Following this we passed the best part of a week in Devon, discussing Horror Film 1 (and a million other things) with Malcolm – from a technical point of view, but also in terms of its cultural/technological context, then and now.
Malcolm gave us some of his 16mm film stock to work with, and his blessing to experiment and explore how the performance might change when it's transferred to new bodies.
In all our re-enactments, we’re interested to explore what the work “meant” when it was originally presented to the public, and what it might mean now.
Meaning, of course, is mediated by technological changes, historical shifts, and biographical events in the life of the artist. Even an extremely faithful re-presentation is different from the ‘original’ in so many ways.
In June 2014, Teaching and Learning Cinema presented the first public performance of their re-enactment of this key work of expanded cinema from 1971.
More info about Re-enactment of Malcolm Le Grice's Horror Film 1
Some blog posts documenting the research and development of our re-enactment:- Horror Film 1 – Re-enactment in Progress at CCAS, Canberra
- Horror Film sketch No. 1
- Pants off, Party on
Lucas Ihlein and Louise Curham, 2015, "Reaching Through to the Object: Reenacting Malcolm Le Grice’s Horror Film 1", in Performance Matters, Vol 1., No1-2, pp. 24-40. More info here, and download the full article here.
Some links from the Canberra Contemporary Art Space web pages about our work there:
- Horror Film 1 - Teaching and Learning Cinema at Canberra Contemporary Art Space
- TLC at CCAS
- Publicity for performance event
TLC presented the work in 2022 at the Contour556 Canberra Biennial, with performances by Nicci Haynes and Lucas Ihlein.
During 2022 Curham and Ihlein began work on a video-based instruction manual for the work.
A folder of photos of Horror Film 1 related material at the British Artists Film and Video Study Collection at Central St Martins College, London.
A folder of photos from the development of the work in England in 2013.
The development of this work in London in 2013 coincided with our first performance of (Wo)man with Mirror at Apiary Studios, presented in association with Unconscious Archives. More info here.
"Tending the Archive": a talk by Louise Curham at the 2015 Australian Society of Archivists Conference. Read it here.
More info on re-enactment as a strategy for action-research, artmaking and art history here.
Steven Ball, "Beyond the Cringe: Australia, Britain, and the Post-Colonial Film Avant-Garde", in Senses of Cinema, Issue 78, March 2016.
Video documentation of Louise Curham performing Horror Film 1, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, June 2014: