The Blind Viewer

After watching Peter Gidal’s Room Film 1973, Michael Snow commented: ‘Your film had to be worked at. I felt… as if it was made by a blind man. I felt that searching tentative quality, the quality of trying to see’ (1.). The desire to see anew, as if it was for the first time, a learning to unlearn (2.), is one of the most enduring aspects of Gidal’s film practice and theory. A body of material as rich with possibilities as unresolved questions, paradoxes and dead ends. And yet, at a time when artists’ moving image has too often become a sheer repository for discourse, a reinvestment in Gidal’s attentiveness to the ‘coming into presence’ of the film may shed light on what these images and sounds do, rather than say. The question remains: how is a critique of image-production enacted, instead of represented?

Notes:
(1.) Snow, Michael, September 1973, quoted by Peter Gidal, ‘Theory and Definition of Structural / Materialist Film’, Structural Film Anthology, London: BFI, 1978, p.17
(2.) Borrowing a famous line from the poem, ‘what we see of things is things’ by Alberto Caeiro. Pessoa, Fernando, The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro, Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2007

About the book:

Benedictions is an indefinite series of communications in varying formats. The project circulates around a periodical publication, each issue of which is organised in response to a single piece of correspondence that is printed on the dust jacket. Contributors to each issue are invited by the editors to construct a response to the document. The editors are Patricia Lennox-Boyd and Jamie Stevens. Issue 1: Ciao Peter Gidal deals with an email from structuralist film-maker and theorist Peter Gidal to David Curtis, scholar and archivist of British experimental filmmaking. Contributors: J. A. Harrington, Anja Kirschner and David Panos, Gil Leung, Helena Vilalta, Robert Leckie, Pil and Galia Kollectiv, Louis Henderson, Phillida Cheetham, Morag Keil.

Source: http://lux.org.uk/shop/products/books/ciao-peter-gidal

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