Cracks in the unity of theory and practice: the London Filmmakers Co-op in the 1970s

It is difficult to think of an artform more thoroughly theorised by its practicioners during the Twentieth Century than the avant-garde film. Stretching from Eisenstein and Vertov, through Jean Epstein, Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Gregory Markopolous, Peter Kubelka, Hollis Frampton etc, filmmakers wrote discourse to accompany their largely non-discursive works, often in explicit defiance of their mainstream counterpart of the narrative feature film, against which many grew increasingly hostile.

This paper will explore how this oppositional embattlement reached its apotheosis (or nadir) in the writings produced by the London Filmmakers Co-op in the 1970s, particularly the work of Malcolm LeGrice and Peter Gidal. The LFMC had been formed in the mid-60s, but it wasn't until the early 1970s that the filmmakers began their prodigious theoretical output. Their writing was borne of the same post-1968 Althusser-infused Brechtianism which informed Screen theory. However, they rejected as "illusionism" even Godard, in favour of their films' purported "materialism." They did so through the cultivation of a doctrine which was essentially a politicisation of the axioms of American structural film, a doctrine which was in fact, this paper will argue, signally incapable of doing justice to their aesthetically important films.