Peter Gidal: Close Up

Peter Gidal: Close Up at AV Festival, Newcastle

Peter Gidal, Close Up, 1983, 70 min
Introduced by Mark Webber

This rare screening of Peter Gidal’s ‘feature length’ film Close Up anticipates the publication of Flare Out: Aesthetics 1966–2016, a collection of essays by one of film’s great polemicists. Gidal was a central figure during the formative years of the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, whose 50th anniversary is being celebrated throughout 2016, and made some its most radical works. His cinema is anti-narrative, against representation and fiercely materialist. In Close Up, Gidal’s political, ultra-leftist practice is augmented by the disembodied voices of Nicaraguan revolutionaries heard on the soundtrack.

Presented by the AV Festival 2016 as part of Resistance: British Documentary Film, more information about all the films in the series here.