The new (April 2017) issue of Artforum features a great article on Peter Gidal’s “Flare Out: Aesthetics 1966–2016” and “Shoot Shoot Shoot“, the LUX publication on the first decade of the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative.

Noam M. Elcott‘s review of these two related books ends with the following summary:

“In tone and substance, many of the essays in Flare Out testify to Gidal’s ‘ultra-left’ politics, polemics that were widely criticized and eventually abandoned by most LFMC adherents for their seemingly intractable dogmatism. And yet many of his arguments seem all too timely today. What was once dismissed as a puritanical asceticism at odds with rudimentary aesthetic pleasure seems sensible now, even compulsory, given our ascendant patriarchal politics. [… ] Infamously, Gidal advocated for a moratorium on representations of women on-screen. Perhaps we consider ourselves too enlightened to brook, or the feminist project too far advanced to warrant, such blunt statements – even in the months dominated by the venom of Trump, the vitriol of Bernie Bros, and the broadcast and social media that enabled both. But Gidal’s unfashionably radical feminism deserved more than a second look in the current climate of fashionably virulent patriarchy.”

(Noam M Elcott, “Structural Integrity”, Artforum, March 2017.)

Jonathan Walley has constructed an extraordinary response to Peter Gidal’s “Flare Out: Aesthetics 1966–2016” using text and images. The article is available online at World Picture Journal and can also be downloaded as a pdf.

The current issue 12 of World Picture (Winter 2017) was guest edited by film artist Luis Recoder and is structured around the theme of “Orthodox.” It opens with a new translation of Theodor Adorno’s “Freud in the Present” and features contributions by Brian L. Frye, Sandra Gibson, Laurence A. Rickels, Kiarina Kordela, Alexander García Düttmann and others.

Peter Gidal’s films Coda I and Coda II (both 2013) can also be streamed online through the journal’s website.

Walley writes: “Color plates in the middle of the book begin with reproductions from Gidal’s notebooks, handwriting scrawled on—of all things—graph paper; as if Gidal wanted some visual reminder of the structures he works against. The grid is an almost comically inapt backdrop to his purposely, persistently disordered, Sisyphusian (constantly starting again, re-trying) prose. Graph/draft paper: his writing retains a sense of the draft, the free-write, the process of working out rather than the completed object—the text—that is supposed to result.”  

The new double issue of the Swedish language film journal Magasinet Walden is out now and includes a dossier on Peter Gidal. A newly commissioned essay by John Sundholm focuses on the temporal aspects of the ‘room films’, with particular emphasis on Room Film 1973, and is accompanied by translations of “Notes on my Film Work” (1975) and “Technology and Ideology in/through/and Avant-Garde Film: An Instance” (1980), two polemical Gidal texts drawn from “Flare Out: Aesthetics 1966–2016“.

Issue 3/4 also contains articles on or by Nicole Brenez, Mary Helena Clark, Harun Farocki, Bani Khoshnoudi, Scott MacDonald, Anne Charlotte Robertson, Susana de Sousa Dias, Malin Wahlberg, and Peter Weiss.

Magasinet Walden is edited by Martin Grennberger and Stefan Ramstedt, whose introduction can be read here.

Single issues or subscribscriptions can be purchased online from www.magasinetwalden.se.